Earlier this week, the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) and Community Pharmacy England (CPE) announced a retrospective increase in funding for 2024/25 under the new pharmacy funding deal.
They said that they had agreed an uplift in funding of £106 million (4.1%) to £2.698 billion for the financial year that ended this week (March 31) to “cover the activity delivered by the sector” in that period.
But it remained unclear how the cash would actually reach contractors.
Read more: BREAKING: New 2025 CPCF funding deal - uplift revealed
Now, C+D has learned that pharmacy contractors have already received the additional sum earmarked for retrospective funding for 2024/25.
A DH spokesperson said that the government has paid contractors £106m more than the original contract amount of £2.592bn for work done in 2024/25.
It has now agreed to include this extra amount in the official funding for 2025/26 and future years, they told C+D.
Read more: Funding breakdown: Write-offs, service payments and activity fees
A CPE spokesperson also told C+D that the DH committed to paying for actual activity during the year at drug tariff rates.
The sector delivered services to the value of £106m more than the original contract amount - meaning contractors have already received the additional money as payments for the services they delivered, they added.
And they reiterated that the government would consolidate this additional sum into the 2025/26 position.
“Not profitable”
The new pharmacy deal represents an 18.6%, or £481m, increase on 2023/24 sector funds – which had stayed at a fixed rate of £2.592bn since a five-year contract was agreed in 2019 – and will see funding for 2025/26 rise to £3.073bn.
The DH also announced that it would fund an additional £215m for Pharmacy First and other primary care access recovery plan services “to enable the service to continue to grow”.
And it said it would write off £193m of “historic medicines margin over delivery” debt that was “primarily accrued” by pharmacists during the pandemic.
Read more: New Pharmacy First cash, bands and thresholds agreed
It comes after the economic review of the pharmacy sector, which was finally published last week, found that “around 47% of pharmacies were not profitable in their last accounting year”.
The analysis estimated that the “full economic cost” of providing NHS pharmaceutical services in England was “in the range of £4.397-5.730bn” in the 12 months to March 31 2024”.
And it concluded that 99% of pharmacies in England are funded at less than this, meaning they are “not sustainable in the long-run”.
Check the C+D site for the latest coverage on this developing story
