Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve access to GP surgeries in (a) Yeovil constituency, (b) Somerset and (c) England.

We recently announced schemes which will benefit from the £102 million Primary Care Utilisation and Modernisation Fund (PCUMF), to deliver upgrades this financial year to more than a thousand general practice surgeries across England. These schemes will create additional clinical space within existing building footprints to enable practices to see more patients, boost productivity, and improve patient care.

This will directly address the issue of staff who cannot work at full capacity due to space limitations and will enable practices to offer more appointments with their existing workforce through better use of space. The Government has already hired more than 1,500 extra general practitioners and announced an £889 million funding boost, the biggest for the sector in years.

The Somerset Integrated Care Board has prioritised 16 schemes to support with its £1 million allocation from the PCUMF, two of which are in the Yeovil Constituency. The Somerset Integrated Care Board has also been provisionally allocated the following amounts from capital programmes and operational capital for 2025/26:

• £43.5 million from our Constitutional Standards Recovery Fund;
• £7.8 million from our Estates Safety Fund;
• £1 million from our Primary Care Utilisation Fund; and
• £45.7 million in operational capital funding.