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Over 3,000 pharmacists have signed a letter to health secretary Wes Streeting warning him pharmacies across England will close without an uplift in funding, leaving patients struggling to access medicines and “blowing an enormous hole” in Labour’s 10-year NHS plan.

The letter, signed by 3,200 National Pharmacy Association (NPA) members, said pharmacy owners are being forced to make “agonising decisions” about the services they will need to stop providing because of poor funding and increasing overheads.

Insisting they are “at breaking point”, the pharmacists told Streeting: “Too many of us are left taking out loans, maximising overdrafts and raiding pensions that we have spent our working lives building to keep our pharmacies afloat, when we should be investing in the community healthcare you want to see.”

Pharmacies already dispensing medicines at a loss face business rate and minimum wage increases from April as they try to stave off closure.

The NPA urged Labour to reform a “broken pharmacy contract that forces” pharmacy owners “to subsidise the cost of the nation’s medicines”.

The NPA also revealed eight pharmacies closed last month and 95 per cent of its members said they “were not in a financial position” to support the Government's “ambitions to move care into the community”.

At least 65 per cent of pharmacies operated at a loss last year, the NPA added, “leaving them at heightened risk”, while the rate of closures stood at over one a week in 2025.

Warning Streeting the situation “cannot go on”, the letter said: “It is important you understand that we face the reality of underfunding in a real and very brutal way.

“We are facing a cliff edge of cost rises – many imposed directly by Government. But without adequate NHS funding pharmacies close, our patients suffer.”

Highest rates of closures between 2022 and 2025 were in deprived areas 

The NPA’s analysis of the latest data on closures broken down by local authority area and weighted by population revealed the highest rates of closures between 2022 and 2025 were in deprived areas with the biggest health needs.

Liverpool topped the list of cities for pharmacy closures per head of population followed by Blackpool, Coventry and Hull. West Berkshire was “the nation’s pharmacy desert” with more than four times fewer pharmacies per head of population than Westminster, the area with the highest.

The NPA warned “the pharmacy network in England now stands at its smallest since 2006”. The letter was signed by NPA members between January 30 and February 17, 2026.

Image: www.parliament.uk