Chief Executive’s Blog: January 2025
By Chief Executive Janet Morrison
New year, new you… so the mantra goes. But for community pharmacy owners the start of 2025 will feel very much like the end of the last year. Already, just ten days in, we have seen national media coverage of pharmacy owners investing their personal savings to keep their business afloat, warnings about the rising levels of pharmacy closures – with the sector increasingly close to collapse, and accounts in Parliament of pharmacies dispensing medicines at a huge loss. And we continue to hear from many of you directly: you are rightly exasperated and desperate as your businesses reach their limit.
Community Pharmacy England’s Committee Members share your anger at how the sector has been treated for many years, despite your astonishing efforts through the pandemic and since then; and we have been conveying that to Government and to the NHS as we press for answers urgently. That has included directly via numerous communications with Ministers, through the ongoing analysis and economic evidence we are providing – such as our analysis and warnings about the impact of the Budget changes – and through our work with Parliamentarians.
We have been assured that negotiations on the CPCF will recommence this month – and that cannot come quickly enough. The figures continue to show the reality that for some pharmacy businesses, any help that may be coming is already too late. Without urgent help, the sector is close to collapsing.
When we met with new Ministers following the General Election we were reassured by their recognition of the challenges that pharmacies face. They also recognised the value of the sector and the potential for expanding on Pharmacy First and other services. The value that pharmacies offer is continuing to rise – from impressive Pharmacy First consultation figures, to flu vaccination delivery – over three million vaccinations this season, and the 69 million unfunded informal healthcare consultations you are providing every year.
But alongside this, the scale of the problem is also increasing – not least with the provisions of the Budget on NMW and Employers NIC due to come into force in April. How to solve the underlying funding crisis remains the focus of Community Pharmacy England, but we also need to know urgently how we can ensure we are making the most of Pharmacy First (both for businesses and for patients) and how this is funded beyond March; how we are going to tackle the long-term medicines supply issues; what the plan is to tackle workload, workforce and other critical pressures; and how we can give pharmacy businesses a clear pathway to a better future which they can both have confidence in and plan for.
Government and the NHS are looking at similar problems on an NHS-wide scale as they consider how to plan for the next ten years of healthcare, to rebuild a sustainable NHS. We, like others, are working to make sure pharmacies are a key part of that plan, including partnering with other primary care representative bodies to ensure that primary care’s voice is heard loudly and clearly, and that Government’s ambitions to move more care into communities are backed by the investment needed. We are also continuing our economic work to influence the Government’s ongoing Spending Review processes. And of course the Independent Economic Review, which we insisted on in the last round of negotiations, is expected to report back soon. This all builds on the work done to secure the promised £645 million investment into the sector in 2023.
I know that the questions you need answers to in 2025 are: is any more funding coming; how much will this help us; and when will it arrive? As we wait for CPCF negotiations to restart we simply don’t have these answers, and Committee Members, who are pharmacy owners themselves, are as angry about this as everyone in the sector.
What we do know is that because of the significant ramping up of our work over the past two years, the value of what you offer is clear and recognised; the scale of your financial crisis is undeniable; the potential that pharmacy has to do more for patients, the NHS and society at large is understood; and that more influential people than ever before – from politicians, to patient groups – are concerned about what the outcome of these negotiations and the future for community pharmacy will be. Of course, none of that solves the NHS affordability crisis that the Government continues to warn publicly about, but it puts pharmacy in a stronger position than ever before as we fight for the investment you so desperately need, and we will continue to build on and to leverage all of it.
We expect to hear news very soon, and as negotiations restart the Committee will be fully focused on getting answers, and investment, to the sector as quickly as possible. We hope that through 2025, the sector gets rather more answers on a whole range of key issues than it is starting the year with.
