GPhC can’t achieve ‘anything useful’ alone, Rudkin admits

General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) chief executive Duncan Rudkin yesterday (May 13) admitted that “the regulator, acting alone, can’t achieve very much of anything useful”.

Rudkin was speaking at the annual Sigma conference about the GPhC’s “new strategy for the next five years”, which it hasn’t “quite got…across the line yet”.

But he said that “a key thing for sure in [the GPhC’s] approach to pharmacy regulation over the next few years is going to be around collaboration”.

“There are very few things now – if there ever were – where really impactful change can be delivered by one organisation acting alone,” he added.

“The days are long gone…where the pharmacy regulator sits on its own and achieves useful, meaningful change”, he said.

“We need to work with other…pharmacy leadership bodies, representatives and trade bodies” – but the GPhC also plans to collaborate with a “wide range of other regulators”, he added.

“You can think of some of the obvious candidates”, he said, naming the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

But “it’s not just about the existing group of regulators because the complexity of what we’re dealing with is growing exponentially,” he added.

“For example, we met recently with the Food Standards Agency (FSA),” he told delegates.

“When we’re looking at increasingly integrating teams delivering care, it’s going to make less and less sense for individual professional groups to be working to…different standards,” he stressed.

Clearing FtP backlogs?

When asked by C+D whether the collaborations would create unnecessary repetition, Rudkin said that they would allow the regulator to “much more systematically [identify] where there are already gaps or overlaps”.

“I think that needs a lot more joint communication, a lot more joint messaging, as well as joint regulatory activity and a much more joined up approach to enforcement,” he added.

This would allow the GPhC to “[work] towards identifying much more quickly in the regulatory process when concerns are raised, where [it] can safely hand off an issue to another organisation,” he told C+D.

He added that these “issues” would then not “clog up the fitness-to-practise (FtP) process with cases that should not – should never perhaps – have been there,” he added.

In February, the GPhC allotted an extra £300,000 to legal fees as part of an overall spend of £700,000 in its 2025-2026 budget to tackle its chronic backlog of open investigation cases.

At the time, the regulator said that “a build-up of legacy cases post-COVID, a large volume of complex cases, increasing volumes of incoming concerns and the changing nature of concerns” had affected its ability to meet investigation standards.

It came as the GPhC launched a consultation about proposals for a 6% increase in the annual registration fees for pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy owners from September 2025.