The GP funding formula is under review because some of its data is around 25 years old. Fairness can survive almost anything if someone stores it in a spreadsheet and escorts it through enough meetings.
The GP funding formula meets modern life
The government launched a six month review of the Carr Hill formula on 9 October 2025. The formula distributes funding to general practices in England. The review aims to support fairer provision for communities with greater health needs, including deprived and coastal areas.
This sounds sensible. It also means the NHS has asked an elderly calculation to understand the present. Historians manage that task. So do family WhatsApp groups. Spreadsheets usually just change the font.
The formula uses expected workload to allocate money. Since officials assembled some of its data, populations and health needs have changed. The number of people trying to book an appointment while proving they are not a robot has also risen sharply in the national imagination.
The review will identify a new allocation formula. It will assess whether officials can introduce it. It will then recommend whether the NHS should replace the Carr Hill model. The process must make fairness measurable and suitable for a meeting where someone can say “we need a baseline” without a patient appearing from the corridor with a breakfast that has gone cold.
Dr Hazel Shortcut, Director of Moderately Useful Buttons, welcomed the process. In this invented comic extension, she said the old formula had received a comfortable chair, a cup of tea and one final chance to explain why the future still looked like 2001.
A postcode lottery with paperwork
The case for change is not theoretical. The announcement says practices in poorer areas can face greater need, heavier workloads and less funding per patient. It also notes that some communities have fewer GPs and longer waits. Places that need more support must therefore prove it through a system that appears to have taken notes since the early days of broadband.
A fairer GP funding formula could direct resources towards areas that need them most. It cannot recruit doctors, shorten every queue or persuade a coastal town that digital transformation is not another name for moving the telephone number.
The Bureau of Practical Prompts has prepared a checklist. It asks whether the new model reflects deprivation, population growth and rising complexity. It then proposes a second checklist to confirm that officials distributed the first checklist fairly. After that, a consultation can decide whether a distribution still counts if nobody can find the attachment.
The review may produce a better formula. It may even produce one young enough to remember why someone created it. Until then, the NHS has achieved a remarkable breakthrough in administrative medicine. The patient is still waiting, but the spreadsheet has been promoted to clinical witness.
Source: Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England announcement.
