Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential financial and workforce impact on GP practices of the requirement to deliver same-day responses to all clinically urgent requests under the 2026/27 GP contract.

The 2026/27 GP Contract makes clear that requests identified by practices as clinically urgent should be responded to on the same day. This builds on NHS England’s Medium Term Planning Framework, which set an expectation that urgent appointments should be delivered on the same day so that patients with urgent needs are prioritised.

We recognise that practices will need the right capacity and flexibility to deliver this. That is why we are investing an additional £601 million in general practices (GPs) in 2026/27, bringing total spend on the GP Contract to approximately £14 billion. This builds on the £1.1 billion increase in 2025/26, the largest uplift in over a decade. Since October 2024 we have recruited 2,000 more GPs. We now have the highest number of GPs by headcount since 2015. The 2026/27 contract also introduces a practice-level GP reimbursement scheme, backed by £292 million of ringfenced funding, to help practices recruit more GPs or expand sessions.

This will support practices to manage demand, improve access for patients, strengthen GP employment, and continue to improve patient satisfaction.

Same-day appointment levels have remained broadly steady. In May 2026, 44.9% of appointments were booked and attended on the same day, up 0.3% from April 2026 and 0.7% from May 2025. This represents approximately 13 million appointments taking place on the day of booking.