PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
GP Surgeries (12 September 2024)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to allow Integrated Care Boards to enter into sub-leases for large non-owned GP leased premises (a) via exception and (b) by amending the rules.

Asked by:
Helen Whately (Conservative)

Under the GP Contract, premises liabilities are the responsibility of the Contractor. Overall contractual payments reflect this arrangement, with the National Health Service also reimbursing direct premises costs including rent, business rates, water, and clinical waste.

There are 8,842 practice premises across England; of these, 51% are leased premises. Integrated care boards (ICBs) are not a formal party to the leases on these properties.

ICBs can hold leases for general practice (GP) or clinical premises, following the transition from clinical commissioning groups which were unable to hold such leases. However, this would require capitalisation of the lease under the International Financial Accounting Standard IFRS16, and limited NHS capital budgets would have to be diverted to offset this commitment, in addition to the payment of rents against the properties.

This would provide, in effect, a double payment of costs against the asset and would commit substantial capital funds to the exercise. Currently, Primary Care Estates capital allocation to integrated care systems would not be sufficient to offset such a capital liability and so an ICB would be required to look to other system partners to provide a capital allocation, thus limiting the ability of the system to invest in primary care estate, address secondary, community care and mental health critical and address the usual infrastructure maintenance requirements.

As a result, in general ICBs entering into sub-leases for large non-owned GP leased premises would not provide the best use of public funds.

Answered by:
Stephen Kinnock (Labour)
8 October 2024