Gideon Amos

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. I thank and congratulate my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour), on her resolute advocacy for pharmacy provision in her constituency. She is right to mention Norton Fitzwarren, which is in my constituency but serves many of her constituents. I pay tribute to Councillor Andy Sully for all his long-term campaigning, which eventually saw a pharmacy return to the village, and I thank Mo Idris, the pharmacist who took the plunge and opened the facility. Yesterday’s debate on Second Reading of the NHS modernisation Bill included much talk about an NHS that works for people, but in Wellington, in my constituency, communities have had to scale the heights of bureaucracy in a system where patients have to work to the tune of the NHS, not the other way around. Wellington went from having four pharmacies to having just two. The Boots pharmacy in the medical centre closed, followed by Jhoots in September, leaving its staff in the parlous state that my hon. Friend referred to earlier. That left only two pharmacies—Superdrug and Boots—for a town of 17,000 residents. Queues that were 15 people deep formed, Boots completely failed to scale up to meet the challenge, medicines were not ordered in time and patients became anxious. I challenged the decision of the NHS to refuse to support the opening of another pharmacy. I pay tribute to the Wellington Pharmacy Action Group. Its dossier, which was sent to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, was a 17-page challenge to NHS Somerset, which, alongside all the pressure brought to bear by myself and others, eventually changed the position. The pharmaceutical needs assessment seems to be fundamentally flawed. How could it be prepared at a time when the town had four pharmacies, but also apparently demonstrate that two pharmacies were enough and no more needed to be opened? As I say, due to huge pressure, the situation was eventually turned around, but it should not be a matter of communities having to rise up against the challenges and rules of the NHS to get or restore pharmacy provision in a town of this size. Allied Pharmacies was granted a licence to open in Luson House, the former premises of Jhoots, which was a fantastic win for the community and came as a result of sustained community pressure. A fourth pharmacy at Westpark has also been approved, subject to appeal. However, the job is not done. The action group says that a further pharmacy is likely to be needed as the town grows, with tens of thousands of new homes under the Government’s new planning rules and national planning policy framework. Wellington is a textbook case of a town where housing growth is outrunning the provision of infrastructure. Essential services should be built in from the start, not promised after the fact, and definitely not reduced by half—from four pharmacies to two. Since 2017, England has lost 1,200 pharmacies. We Liberal Democrats would require developers to fund GP surgeries as a priority from the outset: “No doctors? No development.” The same must go for ensuring adequate provision of pharmacies and dentists if the Government’s housing plans are really to work for local people.