Chief Executive’s Blog: A year of intense pressures

From Chief Executive Janet Morrison

As we approach the festive Bank Holiday period and end of the year, I want to pause to recognise just how much community pharmacy has delivered for patients and communities in 2025. Despite intense pressures felt every day, pharmacy owners and their teams continue to show extraordinary resilience, dedication and care in difficult financial and operational circumstances.

We know that for many, this year involved tough and sometimes painful choices to keep services running safely.  This is illustrated in every message, polling submission and pressures survey response Community Pharmacy England receives, in the personal testimony of owners and their teams and reflected in the analytics we generate – all of which form the basis of our submissions and ongoing discussions with Ministers, Government and the NHS. We know that our requests for feedback are frequent but we really value the time pharmacies take to give us evidence to strengthen the case we make on your behalf. Of course this vital work continues into 2026 so that we can ensure the Government and NHS cannot shy away from the very desperate situation that community pharmacies find themselves in.

Community Pharmacy England is preparing intensively for the next round of CPCF negotiations. Closing the funding gap, and reducing the financial and operational strain that you are under, remains the Committee’s top priority. Earlier this year, following  challenging negotiations, we secured a funding uplift for 2024/25 and 2025/26. This was a difficult settlement to accept – we were absolutely clear that it was only a first step towards sustainability and that considerably more funding is needed to put the sector onto a stable footing. A sector that has endured a decade of real-terms cuts and operational pressures, cannot recover overnight. And the significant additional costs from employers NIC, the National Minimum Wage and inflation piled on by the Budget wiped out much of the gain in the SAF.   Put simply, community pharmacy remains in crisis with significant risks to the millions of patients who rely upon us everyday.  Investment is needed urgently if we are to safeguard the network, ensure the safety of medicines supply and deliver vital clinical services.

Alongside these preparations for negotiations, the Committee is continuing to work on long-term strategy, the case for further investment and to promote the clinical solutions a sustainable network could deliver. This is critical work, as policymakers shape implementation of the 10-Year Health Plan. As its workstreams are developed in the coming months, we will champion the part that community pharmacy can play in neighbourhood health and in supporting the shifts from hospital to community, treatment to prevention and analogue to digital. The sector has significant untapped clinical potential that can only be realised if barriers are removed, and pharmacies are given the right tools and sustainable investment to succeed.

The value of pharmacy is beyond doubt. What we need now is a lasting commitment from Government and the NHS commitment to secure its future. My colleagues, Committee Members and I have been clear and vocal about the need for urgent stabilisation and investment to get the possible results for patients and communities.  The need couldn’t be greater.