Funding for pharmacies in England is £800m less in real terms than it was a decade ago, the government has confirmed.
Responding to a parliamentary question earlier this week, pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock revealed that the real-terms value of pharmacy funding for 2025/26 is £3.073bn, compared to £3.864bn in 2015/16.
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The Company Chemists’ Association (CCA) said the cut is “further compounded by the significant rise in workload pharmacies have faced since that time”, adding that the network of brick-and-mortar pharmacies in England has declined by 13% since March 2016.
It said the funding uplift the sector received in 2025 “was welcomed” but “falls short of what the pharmacy network needs to survive”, with the NHS’s own independent analysis last year identifying a £2bn shortfall in funding.
Government must “change course”
CCA chief executive Malcolm Harrison said the body welcomes Kinnock’s “finding that the sector is still significantly underfunded, despite the changes made a year ago”.
The government “has pledged to stabilise the community pharmacy network”, he added, but this “will only be possible with fair funding which reflects the workload the NHS and patients expect and need”.
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“As well as damaging the pharmacy sector, this underfunding significantly limits the NHS’s ability to meet patients’ needs.”
“Pharmacies could release tens of millions of primary care appointments each year, but this is only possible with funding to stabilise the sector, and further investment so patients can access routine primary care from pharmacies closer to their homes and places of work,” he stressed.
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Liberal Democrat spokesperson for health and social care Helen Morgan MP, who put the question on funding to Kinnock, warned that if pharmacies continue to be underfunded, “we risk putting hospitals already on the brink under even more pressure, leaving many patients to suffer unnecessarily”.
She said that “without additional funding, more pharmacies will close - affecting rural, coastal and deprived communities the hardest - where they are most needed”.
And she called on the government to “change course” by “reversing the brutal cuts to pharmacies under the Conservatives” and “exempting pharmacies from the government’s disastrous jobs tax to prevent any future surge in closures”.
“Depressing reality”
National Pharmacy Association (NPA) chief executive Henry Gregg said MPs and ministers should be reminded that “a decade of cuts has led to serious consequences for patients’ access to care”.
He added that the sector is “still waiting for negotiations to begin” on a new pharmacy contract in England, and needs “swift progress in the light of statistics like these and the depressing reality on the ground for pharmacy teams and patients”.
“It’s an opportunity for the government to fulfil its promises to stabilise the pharmacy network and support pharmacies to provide more NHS clinical care close to where people live, work and shop.”
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It comes after Community Pharmacy England (CPE) this week revealed that the timeline to “conclude and implement” negotiations for the 2026/27 funding deal will run from April to July.
And it follows the NPA warning that pharmacies are losing millions a month due to “chronic underfunding” by the NHS.
