The Government's 10-Year Health Plan includes the objective of delivering a Single Patient Record. This will allow health and care providers, wherever they deliver care in England, to access the key information they need from an individual’s medical records. Mandatory information standards, which all providers must follow, will ensure the interoperability of systems within the National Health Service.

We will consult with the devolved administrations and Crown Dependencies, on areas of mutual interest, such as the Single Patient Record, which can improve cross-border healthcare and the safe exchange of information where possible to improve healthcare, and minimise risk to patients.

We are committed to improving capacity and access to local services across the country. Integrated care boards (ICBs) and general practices (GPs) have a statutory duty to ensure sufficient provision of medical services, tailored to the needs of their local populations, accounting for factors like population growth, deprivation, and demographic change.

While GPs operate as independent contractors, they are held to nationally agreed standards under the GP Contract, which is reviewed and improved annually. The 2024/25 contract is backed by the largest increase in GP funding in years, specifically an £889 million uplift. This investment supports key reforms to improve access across the country, including a new requirement for practices to offer online appointment requests throughout core opening hours.

We will continue working closely with ICBs to monitor and address variations in access, so that every patient can get the care they need, when they need it.

The Government is determined to fix the front door of our National Health Service, making it easier for everyone to see a general practitioner (GP) when they need to.

In October 2024, we injected £82 million into the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme to enabling the recruitment of 1,000 newly qualified GPs across England, which will increase the number of appointments delivered and care for thousands of patients.

We’ve just delivered the biggest boost to GP funding in years, an £889 million uplift, with GPs now receiving a growing share of NHS resources. For the first time in four years, the General Practitioners Committee England backed the new 2025/26 contract, which includes key reforms to improve access, for instance by making sure that patients can request appointments online throughout core hours.

Under the GP Contracts, premises liabilities are the responsibility of the contractor. Overall contractual payments reflect this arrangement, with the National Health Service also reimbursing direct premises costs including rent, business rates, water, and clinical waste.

There are 8,842 practice premises across England, of these, 51% are leased premises. The NHS is not a formal party to the leases on these properties. If NHS England were to consider a formal underwriting of the leases, legal advice notes, that would constitute a commitment, which would require capitalisation under the International Financial Accounting Standard IFRS16, and limited NHS capital budgets would have to be diverted to offset this commitment, in addition to the payment of rents against the properties.

This would provide, in effect, a double payment of costs against the asset and would commit substantial capital funds to the exercise, limiting the ability of integrated care systems to invest in the primary care estate, address secondary and community care, mental health services, and critical and usual infrastructure maintenance requirements, significantly adversely affecting the overall investment plans for communities. As a result, NHS England considers that a formal underwriting of leases would not provide best use of public funds.