The Department of Health and Social Care (DH) will not say when it will resume its “consultation” with Community Pharmacy England (CPE), in response to C+D questioning .

On Monday, the parliamentary under-secretary for health and social care Baroness Merron told the House of Lords in response to a written question that the government is looking at the new contract as “a matter of urgency”.

But quite what constitutes the “urgency” referred to in Merron’s answer is unclear, despite C+D’s probing.

Read more: Saturday shutdown: Pharmacy protest ballot could see weekend closures

CPE told C+D yesterday that it still doesn’t know “precisely” when the negotiations on the contract to replace the five-year community pharmacy contractual framework (CPCF) will restart, let alone when they will “reach [a] conclusion”.

“We will issue further information as soon as we have it,” a spokesperson for CPE told C+D.

And on a day when thousands of National Pharmacy Association (NPA) member pharmacies joined in protest against their perilous state of funding and have announced a ballot on further action, the DH was yesterday (September 19) not able to say when it will be ready to restart negotiations on a contract with the community pharmacy sector.

Read more: CPE ‘expecting’ delayed pharmacy contract negotiations to ‘resume soon’

The government said that talks would resume as soon as it is able but could not say what it needed to complete before this can take place.

“This government inherited a broken NHS where pharmacies have been neglected for years,” a DH spokesperson said, adding that it intends to “make better use of pharmacists’ skills”.

Protracted contract

Nearly six months have passed since the expiry of the five-year CPCF.

This week, C+D reported that pharmacies in Wales can look forward to “a “6% increase in community pharmacy funding for the current year”.

On September 4, two months after the July general election, CPE said that it expected the negotiations on the CPCF for 2024/25 “to resume soon” as it announced that it had met with new pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock.

Read more: Pharmacy funding talks ‘unlikely’ before September, says CPE

In July, CPE said that it was “seeking early meetings with new government ministers” but stressed that formal negotiations on a new funding deal may not begin for “some weeks”, even in a “best-case scenario”.

Later that month, it announced that pharmacy funding talks were “unlikely” to resume before September.

CPE also announced in July that it had hired PA Consulting, a specialist consulting firm, to advise it on negotiations and complete an “economic project” for the sector.