We wait weeks for an appointment. Nobody is building a surgery.
Every new estate adds registered patients to a practice list. It does not add a GP, and it does not add a building.
Why a new surgery almost never appears
This is the clearest case of the mechanism on the whole site. Primary care premises are funded through NHS routes on NHS timetables, assessed against NHS priorities. Planning obligations from a housing development are constrained to what is directly related to that development — which in practice funds a contribution toward capacity, not a surgery. And the health contribution from a hundred and fifty houses is nowhere near the cost of one.
The result is that the list grows and the estate does not. Then it grows again.
Verify before adversarial use: whether NHS bodies are statutory consultees in planning, and ICB involvement in local plan making — this has moved.
The turn
New settlements get health infrastructure planned into them from the outset, because at that scale it is impossible to pretend the patients will be absorbed elsewhere. Dispersed growth relies on exactly that pretence, four hundred times over, until the pretence becomes a three-week wait.
By district — patients per FTE GP
Snapshot (31 December 2025): about 2,319 registered patients for every full-time-equivalent fully qualified GP (excluding trainees and locums), across 234 practices we can place in our districts.
| District | Patients / FTE | Patients | Practices |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fenland | 2,844 | 119,444 | 10 |
| Maldon | 2,796 | 59,840 | 7 |
| Ipswich | 2,711 | 185,719 | 11 |
| Tendring | 2,702 | 162,912 | 17 |
| Colchester | 2,584 | 219,160 | 15 |
| Braintree | 2,542 | 150,757 | 15 |
| Uttlesford | 2,445 | 99,746 | 8 |
| East Hertfordshire | 2,431 | 160,220 | 12 |
| Chelmsford | 2,424 | 214,491 | 15 |
| Babergh | 2,408 | 80,439 | 6 |
| Cambridge | 2,315 | 202,114 | 16 |
| North Hertfordshire | 2,255 | 125,178 | 11 |
| Mid Suffolk | 2,142 | 103,696 | 9 |
| West Suffolk | 2,137 | 217,378 | 19 |
| East Suffolk | 2,118 | 246,069 | 24 |
| Huntingdonshire | 2,063 | 199,478 | 17 |
| East Cambridgeshire | 1,997 | 96,042 | 8 |
| South Cambridgeshire | 1,793 | 166,192 | 14 |
Source: NHS England General Practice Workforce practice-level CSV; patients per FTE fully-qualified GP excluding trainees and locums (TOTAL_GP_EXTG_FTE); practices assigned to districts via ODS epraccur postcode → postcodes.io admin_district (LPA).
Questions
- Isn't the GP shortage a national workforce problem?
- Largely, yes — and that is an argument for putting new patients where new capacity is being purpose-built, not for adding them to lists that are already closed.
- Doesn't the developer pay a health contribution?
- Usually something, usually small, and it goes toward capacity in the existing system rather than toward a new surgery. It is not a building.
- Would a new town actually get surgeries built?
- At sufficient scale, health facilities are planned in from the start — not optional in the way they are optional for a village extension. That is the whole difference.
- So you're just NIMBYs.
- We want new homes in places where new surgeries are built. Right now we are adding patients and nothing else.
- Where would you put them instead?
- Somewhere large enough that health premises are designed in from the start, instead of relying on existing lists to absorb everyone.
- Where do your figures come from?
- NHS England General Practice Workforce practice-level statistics (31 December 2025): registered patients divided by FTE fully qualified GPs excluding trainees and locums. Practices are assigned to districts via ODS postcode and the local planning authority. If we have got something wrong, email corrections@stopurbansprawl.uk and we will fix it and say what changed.
What's planned near us?
Find the district page for where we live.
All infrastructure topics · The numbers · Corrections
It's clear we don't have enough infrastructure already. So how can the government expect to build another 1,367,880 homes?
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