With a new Government and new holders of the public purse in place, will our negotiators now extricate themselves from over a decade of stagnation and poor performance?

Summer is finally here, as is a new government – the first since the early 2010s. A new paymaster. Perhaps A New Hope.

Don’t get your hopes up, science fiction fans. This is not another 1980s retrospective suddenly pivoting towards a dystopian galactic empire. Also, no cork boards will be harmed in this episode.

Let us instead talk about the fantastical. The early 2010s. Clegg-mania was still a thing. The impact of austerity hadn’t been felt in the real world, though it soon would be.

In the world of fantasy fiction, fans of Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin wait patiently – actually impatiently – for the next chapter in the beloved saga.

The most recent book in the series was released in July 2011, meaning it is now well over a decade since the last substantive progress was made in that literary franchise.

It is also over a decade since the election of the Cameron-Clegg coalition government and the conservative polity has led the way in corridors of power.

The election of Keir Starmer’s Labour Government last month changed that. With great power comes great responsibility, but one wonders exactly what responsibility the new government will feel to the community pharmacy sector.

Significantly, there will be a gap between what a sector that has often been a great advocate for change feels is owed and what the incoming government feels it needs to respond to.

What have we learned from the early days of Keir Starmer’s Government and its approach to community pharmacy? Unsurprisingly, not much. The King’s speech referenced 40 prospective parliamentary bills, but only two were in the domain of health: the resurrection of the age-progressive tobacco ban and a reform of mental health treatment.

It is, of course, far too early to make anything like a judgement on the future of community pharmacy under the current administration. Surely it can be no worse than under the last.

While former Health Secretary and fanciful game show host Victoria Atkins was bigging up the success of Pharmacy First, Labour and Community Pharmacy England (CPE) were pointing out that nearly 1,000 pharmacies had closed since 2017. This no doubt reduces the number of pharmacies you can first attend.

In other news, during the election campaign and immediately afterwards, newly minted Secretary of State for Health Wes Streeting had sudden onset amnesia about his predecessor Jonathan Ashworth’s commitment to reverse the 2015 and subsequent funding cuts.

This is, to some extent, no surprise. Promises in opposition are mere pie in the sky. If it doesn’t make the election manifesto, it didn’t happen. And even if it did, often it didn’t.

Yet Labour is content to admit that the NHS is broken and needs radical help to fix it. Leaning on the community pharmacy sector is likely to be one of those fixes.

These words – and they are, at the moment, only words – must be warming the cockles of the negotiators in Community Pharmacy England Towers.

How will CPE play its hand? Pharmacy can’t strike, doctors and nurses can. So the sector immediately slips down the pecking order of political priorities, like a child’s game of Snakes & Ladders.

But the fact that we can’t strike, and the fact that we chase the FP10 like frantically rolling the dice again and again to land on the ladder means we’re always there.

CPE is in the midst of a series of summer roadshows and events engaging with and explaining to their stakeholders what the negotiating position is and trying to focus pharmacy owners on what the opportunities are.

Some of these messages are simple, such as “do as many vaccinations as you can”. Some are more nuanced – don’t chase services that eat into the Global Sum.

If you’re wondering why your local LPC isn’t pushing the Discharge Medicines Service, the Smoking Cessation Service or even the New Medicine Service as much as you would have expected, it’s because every consultation fee paid there reduces the dispensing fee for someone elsewhere.

This seems and is a crazy situation. The Government needs community pharmacy to provide capacity, but providing capacity in one service often deprives the sector of funding in another because of the limitations of the global sum.

How then will the negotiators play this? It is neither a game of thrones in a fantastical world nor a child’s parlour game. It demands real deliberation. We need our negotiators to extricate themselves from over a decade of stagnation and poor performance.

Remember to say that out loud. We have been underserved, chronically underserved. Just like the fans of a certain fantasy author patiently waiting 10, 12 or 15 years for the next instalment in their beloved franchise.

The difference is, we’re now paying an extra £1.5million a year to be served. And we don’t need any extra dragons – just a happy ending.

Outsider is a community pharmacy commentator