As Outsider reveals his bingo card picks for 2025, an early resolution to pharmacy funding talks seems an ever more distant possibility

Happy New Year – or should I just say, er… “new year”. Happiness and pharmacy have been unfamiliar bedfellows recently and nothing that happened in the twelve months of 2024 changed that. It seems unlikely that anything over the next year will make much a a difference either.

This of course could be entirely erroneous. The new year could bring a great change in community pharmacy fortunes but there is scant evidence of that happening, or anything to be frank.

January is typically a time of looking forward. The first few days feel like running to stand still – successfully delivering ten days of trade and workload over a mere seven takes it out of the best of us. Combining that with the seasonal peak of winter always takes a little recovery time. Yet after that passes there is chance to look forward. There are the usual milestones to plan for – financial year end and the like – but this year Easter falls late in April so is a complication to be worried about later.

It’s a time for preparing and planning. Three months to get ready for the next contract update, the new service developments, reimbursement changes. Or there should be. This is the time when Local Pharmaceutical Committees should be frantically chasing pharmacies to book their teams on the nearest training course, hammering the CPPE (other training providers are available) website for the next available session.

This year – tumble weed.

Community Pharmacy England is insisting – to anyone who mouths the syllable ‘neg’ – that THEY ARE NOT, repeat, NOT in negotiations with the Department. I can exclusively confirm this to be true. In fact I can reveal that the CPE negotiating team were last seen splitting themselves between Whitehall and south Wales handing out missing persons flyers for The Honourable Stephen Kinnock, MP, Minister of State. Last seen somewhere, doing something, but what?  Your guess is as good as anyone else’s.

What then, can we look forward to in 2025? Will the four horsemen of the community pharmacy apocalypse come riding over the horizon or will Janet and Alastair ride out of CPE Towers on white chargers, in full armour and save the day? One can only dream.

It seems more likely that any settlement that comes, as it must come at some point – shall be a bridging exercise. It will take us from how the five-year framework fizzled out last March to whatever new landscape April 2026 brings us – with the cohort of all singing, all dancing, all prescribing newly-qualifieds in that September.

There will inevitably be a fudge about how some of the five-year contract actions were never quite finished, and there will be another fudge about historic and prospective Category M funding. Some things are timeless.

Yet every year brings surprises, some welcome, some less so, and what follows are a three of my 2025 pharmacy news bingo card picks.

First up, the future of Big Blue, Booty-wooties. Not a week passes in the United States media without another long form feature about the decline of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Boots UK’s international conglomerate parent company.

Stefano Pessina conquered the world with reverse takeovers of Boots then Walgreens, but the cream has curdled.  

Consumers are deserting Walgreens in the US and investors are following. There has been rumours of selling off Boots UK, and now there are potential takeover talks. Everyone working in community pharmacy in the UK loves or hates Boots.

Most of us do or have worked there. No-one wants to see it go the same way as Lloydspharmacy.

Speaking of the old Big Green (as no-one ever called them), the next couple of things to keep an eye on this year revolve around what’s left of it. Look out for the first small chain of ex-Lloyds branches to royally bite the dust and collapse.

Most ex-branches were almost given away, as long as you agreed to pay the rent and buy your drugs from AAH. 

But rents keep rising and there’s no margin in dispensing. It may have seemed a steal taking on a few branches here and there, but the best battle plans struggle to survive first contact, especially if that first contact comes in the form of increases to the minimum wage and National Insurance contributions.

The third bingo card pick is one where we inevitably shoot ourselves in the foot. And I predict it will again involve an ex-Lloyds branch. Which newly minted independent will not only have been practising at the limit of their license, but well beyond. Mail on Sunday front page beyond. I hope it doesn’t happen (again) but it feels ripe for it.

I’ll keep my eye on the newspapers stands in fearful anticipation. In the mean time I wish you the best 2025 you can have. I’m off to join the CPE Towers gang in South Wales searching for a certain Mr. Kinnock.

Outsider is a community pharmacy commentator