GP Funding: South-west England

Ashley Fox Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Martin Wrigley]

The hon. Member is absolutely right: we have to consider these things. I have spent many hours persuading my local hospital trusts and the integrated care board to talk to the local authorities and work in the cycles of the local plan, so that they get their requirements into that plan. All too often they say, “A new housing development has just been built. We need a new GP practice with it,” and that is too late. The cycles do not add up. The system is broken, and we need to change that.

The Buckland surgery is underfunded by some 800 patients every year. It is part of the Templer primary care network, in which 2,500 patients are effectively treated for nothing. This means that the Buckland practice faces an annual shortfall of approximately £84,000—money that would cover another GP. If we then look at the changing number of patients per GP, in 2019 each GP was supporting 1,800 patients, compared with around 2,400 today.

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

My constituents tell me of their difficulty in getting an appointment with their GP. Does the hon. Member share my view that GP practices should get a bigger share of NHS funding, which would enable them to improve the health of our constituents? And does he share my concern that much of the extra money allocated by the Government risks being swallowed by increased national insurance contributions, inflation and pay awards?

[Martin Wrigley]

Practice managers tell me that that has already happened and they are less funded now than they were last year.

On the changing numbers, each GP was supporting 1,800 patients in 2019 and is supporting 2,400 today, but safe care is often estimated to be closer to 1,400 per GP. So we are overloading GPs with patients. Practices make heroic use of pharmacists, physios and nurse practitioners, but the arithmetic does not add up. Meanwhile, the other part of their funding, the quality and outcomes framework scheme, has faced changes that have negatively impacted primary care. This meant that, nationally, £298 million was redistributed from the QOF into the global sum—we can see how bizarre this funding set-up gets; the names are just weird—and into cardiovascular disease prevention funding. Another £100 million of funding was repurposed but does not put extra capacity into the system. Rather than providing new money to support GPs, this felt to practice managers that the Government had been rearranging the deckchairs.