Alison Bennett

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I sincerely commend the hon. Member for Leicester East (Shivani Raja) for securing this important debate and setting it out in such clear terms. Community pharmacies are often overlooked as a source of care for those in need, but in constituencies such as mine in Mid Sussex they are vital. Many of us know what the 8 am rush for a GP appointment can be like, so the fact that there is an alternative trusted high-street healthcare service where people can walk in, speak to a professional and receive advice and treatment is enormously valuable. It is also exactly the kind of shift towards preventive and community-based care that we need to see more of and not less. Pharmacies take pressure off GP surgeries. They help people get advice earlier, manage conditions locally and, importantly, can keep people out of hospital, but community pharmacies are under immense pressure, as we have heard. Last year, I visited Kamsons pharmacy at the Vale primary care centre in Haywards Heath, where I met Julia from Community Pharmacy Surrey and Sussex, as well as Mark and the wider Kamsons team. I was struck by just how much local pharmacists do beyond dispensing medicines. A little like the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) when he was much younger, Kamsons provides free home deliveries for prescriptions and help patients organise multiple proscriptions into pill organisers. For vulnerable and elderly residents, these services can literally be a lifeline. They enable people to remain independent and to continue living safely in their own homes, while having the support they need to manage their medication. The team I met were enthusiastic and deeply committed to helping local people, but they also expressed real disappointment at the level of support currently available to community pharmacies. There is a strong feeling among local branches that the extraordinary contribution pharmacies made during the pandemic has been forgotten. They are struggling to balance the books, as a number of Members have explained. Community pharmacy funding has fallen substantially in real terms over the past decade. The Government’s recent funding settlement is a welcome step in the right direction, with significant increases announced for ’24-25 and ’25-26 and continued support for services such as Pharmacy First, blood pressure checks and contraception, but we must be honest about the scale of the challenge. That additional funding came after years of financial pressure, while analysis has identified a funding gap of more than £2 billion across community pharmacies. Rising energy, staffing and medicine costs are placing further strain on businesses that are already operating on tight margins, and patients increasingly experience another pressure directly: medicine shortages. Pharmacists tell me that they can spend hours every day simply trying to source medicines that they have been asked to dispense. That time could be spent with patients, and it means that the pressure does not stop at the pharmacy door. In my constituency, I have heard from patients whose pharmacies have had to reduce opening hours and staffing because of financial pressures. When a pharmacy closes earlier, a prescription issued later that day can potentially be delayed until the following day. For someone waiting for an essential medicine, that can be deeply distressing. When a pharmacy is struggling to fulfil prescriptions, the consequences ripple through the entire health service: a patient who cannot get their medication may return to their GP; that GP surgery then has another appointment to deal with; a patient whose condition worsens may ultimately require hospital treatment; and another pharmacy, already under pressure, may have to pick up the pieces when a patient desperately seeks an alternative. That is why I ask the Minister to look at community pharmacies not as an optional extra but as a vital piece of the system. We can see the difference locally. Through Pharmacy First, community pharmacies in my area have reportedly saved almost 2,000 GP appointments—1,937, to be precise. That is 1,937 occasions when people have been able to receive appropriate care closer to home, freeing up GP capacity for those who need it most. That is the model we should be expanding, but we cannot ask pharmacies to keep doing more with less. The Liberal Democrats are calling for a new long-term and sustainable funding model for community pharmacies. My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) tabled amendments to the Health Bill about rescuing pharmacies when they have gone bust, which the Liberal Democrats supported; will the Minister seek to add those to the Bill when it goes to the Lords? We want further investment to be directed towards smaller towns and rural areas, as other Members have set out, including parts of Mid Sussex where access can be particularly difficult. We want Pharmacy First to be expanded, giving patients more accessible routine services and freeing up GPs to concentrate on more complex cases, and an exemption for pharmacies from the national insurance contribution increase so that funds are being spent on patients and vital medications. We also need to tackle the practical problem of medicine shortages. Pharmacists need greater flexibility to substitute medicines where clinically appropriate, rather than spending hours trying to source a particular product that may simply be unavailable. The message I heard in Haywards Heath was very clear: pharmacists want to help. They want to provide more services, support their patients and take pressure off GPs and hospitals, but they need a system that recognises the value of what they do. Community pharmacies are often the first place someone turns to when they need healthcare advice. They are local, accessible and trusted. When they are properly funded and supported, they can keep people healthier for longer, help vulnerable residents remain independent in their own homes and take pressure off the rest of the NHS. The Government have made a start with their recent funding settlement; I welcomed that, but a first step is not enough. I urge the Minister to listen to the pharmacists I have spoken to in Mid Sussex and across the country and put in place a genuinely long-term plan for community pharmacy. Our local pharmacies have been there for our communities; we need to make sure that the Government are there for them.