An estimated £296m of the £645m primary care recovery plan pharmacy fund was 'absorbed by the NHS for other purposes', Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has confirmed. 

From the £645m announced in May 2023, an estimated £349m has been spent on:

  • Pharmacy First set-up payments, monthly payments and service fees
  • the hypertension case-finding service
  • the pharmacy contraception service
  • development of IT changes for the three services
  • NHS marketing for Pharmacy First
  • writing off a £112m 'overpayment'

This was spent over two years: £204m in 2023/24 and £145m in 2024/25, according to CPE estimates.

This leaves a total of around £296m that was 'absorbed by the NHS for other purposes', CPE has confirmed. 

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The £645m funding was announced as part of the primary care recovery plan in May 2023, when it was described by NHS England as a 'government investment of £645 million over two years to expand community pharmacy services'.

But CPE has since said that the £645m was 'a one-off funding pot made available to support community pharmacy services – particularly the introduction of Pharmacy First – but was not a ring-fenced budget like for example the Contract Sum'.

And CPE director of NHS services Alastair Buxton told the sector last year that NHSE had been 'quite clear' about its views on the £645m and had said: 'This is money that we will spend as we see fit. If you earn it, you get it, but it's not your money.'

And he suggested that the NHSE marketing campaigns, which were funded from the £645m pot, were not very effective.

Part of the £349m that did go towards the sector was spent on developing IT systems to support the new services.

But amid repeated IT issues after the launch of the services, one contractor told The Pharmacist that he felt pharmacists were repeatedly overlooked, especially with regard to IT systems.

‘It feels the same old problem: we've not got an IT system that’s acceptable for us,’ pharmacy group owner Ashley Cohen told The Pharmacist last year.

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‘We're at the bottom of the gene pool, pharmacists. Out of the £645 million [for Pharmacy First and community pharmacy services] a significant number of million was supposed to have been spent on good IT systems.

‘Well, the IT systems weren't even set up and ready for when we launched. And the goalposts have changed after five weeks.’

And pharmacist MP Sadik Al-Hassan recently suggested that the money to develop IT systems to support the roll-out of Pharmacy First was 'not well spent'.

A spokesperson for IT supplier Positive Solutions commented on Mr Al-Hassan's suggestion, telling The Pharmacist that 'the money allocated to develop Pharmacy First was significantly below the actual costs incurred by the suppliers involved and relied on said suppliers to effectively self-fund large parts of the work involved.'

They also said the funding 'compares extremely poorly to equivalent funding for GP system IT developments – a disparity that is unnecessarily stifling the ability for NHS initiated development work in community pharmacy to keep apace of other primary care IT systems'.

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And they stressed that the systems had been developed quickly in response to 'political pressure'.

'The commissioning of IT in the sector requires a complete overhaul and is simply not fit for purpose and hasn’t been for a long time,' they added.