Government has been warned that a worrying one third of pharmacies face service cuts within weeks if urgent funding isn’t made available.
Owners representing one in three pharmacies in England – serving an estimated 15.5 million patients – have taken the unprecedented collective step to write to the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, to warn him that pharmacies ‘are at real risk of imminent closure due to intolerable financial pressures… blowing an enormous hole in the 10 Year Plan before it has even begun’. This included pharmacies in Streeting’s own constituency, and saw them warn that they are being faced with ‘agonising decisions about what services to cut to their patients to keep their doors open’ when new costs hit in April; this includes spiralling costs imposed by the government, including business rate rises and minimum wage increases, on top of historic funding cuts, adding to the risk that patients could lose their local pharmacy.
As Ministers consider their 2026 funding offer to pharmacies, the letter urged the Health Secretary to ‘keep [his] promise to stabilise pharmacy funding so we can deliver for the NHS’. The letter went on to say that Streeting’s ‘ambition to reform the NHS to bring care closer to communities is what we have devoted our careers to’ but that ‘too many of us are left taking out loans, maximising overdrafts and raiding pensions that we have spent our working lives building to keep our pharmacies afloat.’
The letter comes as a new survey by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) found that at least 65 per cent of pharmacies in England operated at a loss in 2025, leaving them at heightened risk. Pharmacy closures have continued at the rate of over one a week last year despite receiving the first funding rise in years. Eight pharmacies shut permanently in England last month (January) alone. Almost all (95 per cent) of pharmacies told the NPA that they were not in a financial position to be able to support the government’s ambitions to move care into the community as outlined in the 10 Year Plan. The NPA, which represents around 6,000 independent pharmacies, have urged the Government to deliver an above inflation funding uplift and are calling Ministers to reform the broken pharmacy contract that forces them to subsidise the cost of the nation’s medicines.
Olivier Picard, Chair of the NPA, commented: “The fact that so many pharmacies operate at a loss should set off serious alarm bells in Government about the stability of medicine supply on which millions of people depend. Pharmacies serving millions of patients are at real risk of closure as a tsunami of new costs arrive and are faced with agonising decisions about how they can continue. Without urgent action, millions of patients risk losing the most accessible part of the NHS; their local pharmacy. This is now a question of patient access and NHS resilience, not just pharmacy funding.
“As people at the very front line of the neighbourhood NHS, we want to deliver on the Government’s ambitions for health and give more services to patients to take pressure away from the rest of the NHS family. But Wes Streeting’s plans to bring care to communities won’t happen if he allows pharmacies to continue closing and those that remain are propped up by pharmacy owners remortgaging their own homes or raiding pension pots. We took a step forward last year and we want Wes Streeting to honour his promise to thousands of pharmacies to provide us with the stability we need to invest in the future.”
