What does the pledge mean? 

The Labour party said in its manifesto: “We will train thousands more GPs.” But what this actually means isn’t clear.

We could find no further reference to this pledge in the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s first Budget speech, or in the supporting document. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) did not answer a series of specific questions about the pledge in November 2024, but told us that it will publish more details in due course.

In particular, we need to know whether the government is promising to train thousands more GPs per year, or just over the course of the current parliament. 

We also need to know what benchmark the pledge should be judged against: the number being trained when Labour took office, or the number who would have been trained otherwise. (We assume the government doesn’t simply mean it will continue the current GP training programme, which already accepts thousands of new applicants every year.)

This is important, because under the previous Conservative government’s long-term workforce plan for the NHS, which Labour inherited, the number of training places for GPs was already supposed to rise from about 4,000 per year in 2024 to 5,000 a year in 2027/28 and about 6,000 per year in 2031/32.

The Labour government has promised to announce its own 10-year plan in the spring of 2025, which may contain more detail. At the moment it’s unclear whether it has simply pledged to continue the last plan, or to enhance it.

It is likely that the pledge only refers to the NHS in England, since this is the part of the health service that the UK government directly controls, with the rest devolved to the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

What progress has been made?

Judging progress on this pledge depends entirely on how it should be measured, which we simply don’t know at the moment.

This kind of ambiguity with manifesto pledges isn’t good enough. As we’ve written elsewhere, unclear commitments may confuse people, at best, and risk fuelling cynicism among voters. As we said in our manifesto standards before the election, manifestos should define things clearly and consistently and be phrased in a way that a reasonable person is likely to understand.

It’s disappointing that the DHSC hasn’t yet been able to tell us what the pledge means either.

We also can’t find a public source of data on the total number of trainee GPs at any given time, although application and acceptance figures are sometimes reported in the media or by think tanks, and NHS England has published somewhat similar data up to 2021.

NHS England publishes monthly figures for the number of trainee GPs working in GP practices, but this figure undercounts the total number of trainee GPs, because people typically spend only two of the three years of GP training working in a practice. The other year is spent on rotation, often working in hospitals.

Health Education England (HEE) told us in 2023 that there were 13,847 GP trainees by headcount, of whom 9,220 were working at GP practices.

From the latest data, for September 2024, we can say that there are already over 1,000 more full-time equivalent GPs in training grade working in practices across England than there were in July, when Labour took office, in part because of the large rise in new starters that happens every August.