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 modernise primary care estates.

In May, we announced schemes which will benefit from the £102 million Primary Care Utilisation and Modernisation Fund (UMF) to deliver upgrades to a thousand general practice surgeries across England this financial year. The NHS Capital Planning Guidance and capital allocations, which set operational budgets for the next four years, have recently been published and include further details on multi-year funding for the UMF.

As part of the 10-Year Health Plan, the Government has committed to deliver a Neighbourhood Health Centre (NHC) in every community across the country over the course of the 10-Year Health Plan. We announced our commitment at the Autumn Budget to deliver 250 NHCs through an NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild Programme. This will deliver NHCs through a mixture of refurbishments, to expand and improve sites over the next three years, and new-build sites opening in the medium term.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning, which includes planning, securing, and monitoring, general practice services within their health systems through delegated responsibility from NHS England. Both ICBs and local health systems will be responsible for determining the most appropriate locations for NHCs.