Periodic Review - General Pharmaceutical Council 2025/26

We have published our latest report for the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC). It covers how the GPhC met our Standards of Good Regulation during 2025/26 and is one of our longer, more detailed periodic reviews. It covers the period 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026.

Key statistics

• The GPhC maintains a register of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacies in Great Britain
• There were 95,788 pharmacy professionals and 13,303 pharmacy premises on the register (as at 30 June 2026)

Key findings and areas for improvement

Standard 3 on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

The GPhC continues to demonstrate a strong commitment to embedding EDI across its regulatory functions, supported by clear governance arrangements, improved data collection, stakeholder engagement and work to strengthen standards, guidance and decision-making processes. The GPhC has taken positive steps to address previously identified gaps, including updating fitness to practise (FTP) guidance to reference racist and other discriminatory behaviour, strengthening EDI expectations in education and training standards, and establishing work to address differential attainment across pharmacy education and training. The GPhC also updated internal guidance on Islamophobia and Antisemitism and we considered this an example of good practice.

Key areas for improvement relate to evidencing the impact of recent or planned activity, notably the GPhC’s work to address disproportionality in concerns received as part of its FTP referrals and differential attainment in pharmacy education; we encourage the GPhC to improve the completeness of its EDI data across all protected characteristics as part of this. 

Fitness to Practise

The GPhC has met four out of five FTP Standards this year. 

As part of this year’s review, we audited a sample of closed FTP cases to evaluate timeliness, investigation quality, decision-making, risk management and support for parties. We also considered more general aspects of case handling including record keeping and whether the cases raised any issues of public protection or public confidence.

The review found that the GPhC continues to operate an accessible FTP process, with no evidence of barriers to raising concerns and clear examples of signposting where matters fall outside its remit. The audit provided strong assurance in several areas, including the quality of investigations, the reasonableness of most decisions, the prompt pursuit of interim orders once risks are identified, and the sensitive and professional handling of communications with case parties. Good practice was also identified in tailored support provided to parties in a number of cases. We did identify some opportunities for improvement through our audit work and will monitor the GPhC’s actions to address these in future reviews.

The GPhC did not meet Standard 15 again this year, because it continues to take too long to resolve FTP cases. The end-to-end median has increased each year since 2018/19, and the number of open older cases has increased slightly this year following a significant fall last year. We note the increase is exclusively in cases aged between 52-103 weeks. In accordance with our escalation policy, we have provided an update letter regarding our concerns to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and Health and Social Care Committee Chair.