Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help improve GP Practice premises to increase the number of (a) consulting rooms to allow practices to train more medical students, (b) GP Registrars and (c) hire more GPs in (i) Broxtowe Constituency, (ii) the East Midlands and (iii) England.

In May 2025, we announced schemes which were prioritised by integrated care boards (ICBs) to benefit from the £102 million Primary Care Utilisation and Modernisation Fund (PCUMF). This fund is to deliver upgrades to more than a thousand general practice (GP) surgeries across England this financial year. These schemes will create additional clinical space within existing building footprints to enable practices to see more patients, boost productivity, and improve patient care.

Building on this, the Government has committed £426 million of Utilisation and Modernisation funding over the next four years to continue upgrading the GP estate. This funding will also support refurbishing the existing estate to deliver neighbourhood health centres over this Parliament, as part of the 10-Year Health Plan commitment.

Through the PCUMF, the NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire ICB has committed £1.9 million to creating space for 250,000 new appointments for 2025/26. For the Broxtowe constituency this was an allocation of £335,000, which creates space for 52,500 appointments across two schemes in Beeston, and one each in Chilwell and Newthorpe. All clinical rooms are flexible in design so can be used for face-to-face clinical consultations with patients, used by GP Registrars, and/or to increase training capacity.

The Department does not hold East Midlands-level data. The Government has taken steps to grow the GP workforce. We currently have the highest number of fully qualified GPs since 2015, and we want to go further. Following feedback from the 2026/27 GP Contract consultation, we are introducing a practice-level GP reimbursement scheme using £292 million of repurposed funding from the current Capacity and Access Payment. This funding will be available to practices to hire additional GPs or fund additional sessions with existing GPs to improve access in GPs. We are also increasing the flexibility of the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme enabling primary care networks to recruit more experienced GPs.

We are also committed to training thousands more GPs. We have expanded GP training places by 250, taking the total number of available places to 4,250 for 2025/26, and we plan to expand this again for 2026/27. Current and future expansions to post-graduate training, including foundation training and GP specialty training, have been planned on the basis of relative need, balanced with ability of locations to support trainees.