An analysis by Community Pharmacy England of the 20 biggest pharmacy companies has revealed that only three are "still in the black," CPE chief executive Janet Morrison has said. 

In a recording of a regional roadshow event for contractors held on July 30, Ms Morrison said that while some might believe that large chains "are doing alright," they are "all facing huge profitability challenges". 

Ms Morrison said her team has been working to raise awareness with the new Labour government of the sector’s funding challenges and the fact that many businesses “are now on the brink of insolvency”. 

However, she added, pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock has a “large brief” encompassing the whole of primary care, and had only recently been briefed by civil servants on the community pharmacy market for the first time. 

Ms Morrison said: “Clearly there are a lot of demands on public expenditure coming from the NHS, and ministers will need to have that resolved before they can give guidance to our negotiations.

“We know that civil servants would be prepared to continue from where we left off but nevertheless we can’t guarantee… what steer will come because these are really challenging times in terms of all the demands on public spending.

“We know that pharmacies need clarity as soon as possible.” 

Ms Morrison said that CPE will be pushing to “re-establish the principle of indexation” both for rising activity levels and mounting costs linked to inflation, commenting: “[Government hasn’t] done that for a long time, but that has to be there – we’ve seen dispensing growing at least four per cent every year, so that would be the starting point.” 

The CPE chief was also highly critical of NHS England’s effort to market the Pharmacy First service to the public, describing the campaign as “not very effective”. 

“We continuously tell NHS England that they need to do more. They have agreed to do a further campaign later on this year, but the message from us and all the other pharmacy bodies is it's no use having a one-off campaign – it needs to be continuous advertising,” she said. 

The event also heard from CPE’s NHS services director Alastair Buxton, who told pharmacy owners about the negotiator’s ambitions to get a range of new services commissioned by the NHS, including a “menopause advice service” and structured medication reviews, the latter of which is only commissioned from primary care network (PCN) pharmacists at present.

He also referenced “an opportunity” for pharmacies to support the Government’s strategy for tackling smoking and the use of vapes by young people, commenting that he believes services like these “will interest the new government – but of course they’ve got to have the funding to fill the funding black hole, and then to fund additional services”.