RCGP responds to the Autumn Budget 2025

Responding to the Chancellor's 2025 Budget, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of GPs said:

“Delivering more care in the community makes sense; it’s where our patients want to be treated and it’s more cost effective for the NHS than hospital care. As a College, we’ve always supported this aspiration, as long as it’s backed up with the necessary resources to deliver safely and in the best interests of patients.

“However, we know many of our members have concerns about how neighbourhood health services will be delivered, including worries about workforce shortages, unclear funding plans and the role of the GP within these new services. We have been clear that resources will need to follow any shift in workload, and GPs must be involved in the decision-making process around the delivery of these new services.

“Investing in new neighbourhood health centres – as announced in today’s budget - is an encouraging start to ensuring we have the right infrastructure to deliver neighbourhood working, but these need to be appropriate for local areas and meet the needs of local communities. What we don’t want is shiny new buildings that patients have to travel miles to get to or are out of step with the integration of primary care services with social care and other services linked to addressing the social determinants of health. Developing neighbourhood health centres must also sit alongside investment in the GP premises that already exist, which our members tell us are often dilapidated and unfit for purpose.

“It was also encouraging to hear the Chancellor commit to investing into NHS technology as too often we are working with slow, outdated technology within limited interoperability between primary and secondary care. And we were pleased to see a focus on prevention for health through the expansion of the soft drinks industry levy, something the College has long-supported.

“Whilst we were relieved not to see further targeting of GP partnerships for tax rises, as had been rumoured and which as a College we have called out, we were disappointed that more funding for core general practice - alongside a Primary Care Investment Standard to ensure increases year on year – were missing. Additional funding will be vital to allow general practice to deliver on the Government’s plans to shift more care into the community.

“We now look to the forthcoming NHS Long Term Workforce Plan for a roadmap as to how the ‘more GPs’, promised today by the Chancellor, will be delivered. We desperately need to recruit and retain many thousands more GPs – and ensure practices have the funds to hire the GPs they need - to get general practice back on track, and provide our patients with the safe and timely care they deserve.”

Further information

RCGP press office: 0203 188 7659
press@rcgp.org.uk

Notes to editors

The Royal College of General Practitioners is a network of more than 54,000 family doctors working to improve care for patients. We work to encourage and maintain the highest standards of general medical practice and act as the voice of GPs on education, training, research and clinical standards.