The Government has announced that GP practices will be allocated a 4 per cent funding boost every year until 2021 to cover the “changes in GP workload” and will update the formula used to allocate funding to individual practices.

NHS England has said that the budget for general practice will increase by 4.2 per cent next year, to £7.65bn. It has also announced that it is updating the formula used to allocate funding to practices, because of changes to the GP workload since the current ‘Carr Hill’ formula was developed a decade ago.

According to NHS England, the budget will increase by between 4 per cent and 5.4 per cent every year, to reach £9.19bn in 2021, an real-terms increase of 25 per cent on current spending, which is describes as “disproportionately higher” than for any other service.

However, a spokesman for the General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC) said that 4 per cent on an inadequate contract value is still an inadequate contract value. Other critics commented that the increase would come with an expectation of a much higher percentage in work output.

Meanwhile, in separate news, the Department of Health (DH) has told NHS England that at least half of England’s population should be covered by the new GP care models, which will see single organisations providing primary and secondary care by 2020.

NHS England has been told that it must also ensure that 100 per cent of patients have access to weekend and evening routine GP appointments by 2020, even though only 3 per cent of responses to the consultation were supportive of routine seven-day GP services. Meanwhile, the requirement for half of patients to be registered with new models of care follows the plans set out in NHS England’s Five-Year Forward View published last year.