General practice overlooked as Chancellor announces £2.5bn NHS funding boost

The Chancellor has announced a £2.5bn ‘day-to-day funding boost’ for the NHS in England but failed to allocate any additional funding to general practice.

Delivering the Spring Budget today, Jeremy Hunt told the House of Commons that the Government will ‘help the NHS meet pressures in the coming year’ and that the funding ‘will allow the NHS to continue its focus on reducing waiting times’.

Alongside this £2.5bn of ‘extra funding for day-to-day activities’, the Government said it will also invest £3.4bn to ‘reform the way the NHS works’, focusing on technological and digital transformation.

However, documents published after the Chancellor’s speech carry no mention of any additional funding for general practice.  

The £3.4bn additional funding for technology will be divided across the following three areas:

• £430m to ‘transform access and services for patients, giving them more choice and the ability to manage and attend appointments virtually’
• £1bn to transform the use of data to reduce time spent on ‘unproductive’ administrative tasks by NHS staff (this includes AI pilots automating the writing and clinical coding of notes and an acceleration of the Federated Data Platform to bring together operational and ICS data currently stored on separate systems to every trust in the country by the end of 2026-27)
• £2bn to update ‘fragmented and outdated’ IT systems across the NHS (but with no specific mention of GP IT systems – the funding will be used to ensure all NHS trusts have Electronic Patient Records by March 2026, to update over 100 MRI scanners with AI and to digitalise transfers of care)

According to the documents, the Government and NHS England ‘will convene an external expert advisory panel’ to ensure that the programme delivers its goals, including ‘making the best use of new and emerging technologies’.

AISMA chairman Deborah Wood said there was ‘very little in the way of good news for general practice’ in today’s budget announcement.

She said: ‘While there will be small gains at a personal level for individual GPs and their staff through cuts to National Insurance contributions, there was no commitment to providing desperately needed additional funding for primary healthcare services. The financial sustainability of many GP partnerships is consequently under threat.’

Ms Wood explained that employed doctors and staff earning more than £50,270 a year will benefit from an additional £754 a year as a result of the cut in National Insurance contributions.

Staff earning between £12,570 and £50,270 will save 2p for every pound earned between the two thresholds.

Self-employed GP partners and locum doctors will also see a cut in their Class 4 NICs for earnings between £12,570 and £50,270.

With the abolition of Class 2 NICs announced in the Autumn Statement, they will also see an additional saving of around £179 a year.

GP leaders have condemned the failure to allocate more funding to general practice, especially after the 2024/25 GP contract included a funding increase of just over 2%.

Londonwide LMCs chief executive Dr Michelle Drage said that the Chancellor stood by a funding decision ‘which will see more GPs and practice team members leave’, and patients waiting longer for appointments.

She said: ‘The 2% increase recently imposed on GPs in the new contract is a fraction of current inflation and goes nowhere near addressing the fact that general practice is currently on its smallest share of the NHS budget in eight years, which is eating away at preventative care while politicians say they are desperate to keep patients healthy and out of hospital.

‘We call on the Chancellor to restore the value of the core contract for essential services – the ones patients need on a day-to-day basis.’

DAUK GP spokesperson Dr Steve Taylor said the budget ‘has failed to provide what is needed for safe and effective patient care’ in the community.

He said: ‘People need access to GPs but the Government has only agreed to give 2% more funding, £3 per patient per year.

‘General Practice has been the most productive area of the NHS doing 20% more than 2019 with fewer GPs, more appointments, more face to face, more on the day, more in the week.

‘The reward for this extra productivity is a cut in funding. This is a catastrophe for patients up and down the country with no help from Government.’

Dr Emma Runswick, BMA council deputy chair, said: ‘After two years of real-terms spending cuts, and amid unprecedented pressures, today’s total funding pledge for the health service – a 0.2% increase in real-terms – is not enough to meet the demands of an ageing and sicker population. For all the talk of productivity, NHS staff cannot be expected to do more with less.’

And although ‘funding for digital transformation in the NHS is long overdue and welcome’ it comes with a ‘lack of meaningful investment to boost and retain the workforce or repair crumbling buildings’, she added.

NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said: ‘Adopting the latest technology is already having an impact on the way we deliver services for patients – including getting your prescriptions on the NHS App and virtual wards which let people recover at home.

‘The significant £3.4bn investment in capital to fund new technology means the NHS can now commit to deliver 2% annual productivity growth in the final two years of the next Parliament, which will unlock tens of billions of savings.’