No single applicant for rural GP contract despite longer procurement period

Not a single applicant has submitted a bid to take over a rural GP practice in the Lake District despite a longer than usual procurement period, the local ICB has said.

Patients in Coniston have demanded that Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB ‘urgently extend and widen’ the search for a replacement provider for the village’s GP practice, adding that the timing of the procurement, which was open between December and February, might have contributed to the lack of applications.

The contract for Coniston Medical Practice, which has a list size of 1,010 patients, was handed back to the ICB on 1 August last year, and Morecambe Bay Primary Care Collaborative took over the running of the practice on a temporary basis ‘while a long-term solution was explored’.

The ICB told Pulse that it launched a GP request for information (RFI) – a formal, preliminary document used by the ICB to check market interest before a tender – to understand if there were any parties interested in providing the service at Coniston.

‘A small number of responses’ was received to the RFI, however despite the limited interest, a full procurement was launched in an effort to keep services in Coniston, the ICB added.

The estimated total value of the ten-year contract was £2,565,000 and the contract went out to tender on 23 December.

The required period of time to go out for procurement is 30 days, but this one went out for 43 days. Despite the longer procurement period, the ICB said it has not received any bids for the contract.

Specialist medical accountant Andy Pow said that the funding available in the bid documents was ‘no way near sufficient’ to run that type of rural surgery.

He told Pulse: ‘Maybe as a branch open part of the week, but not a full one five days a week. The bid showed circa £250,000 a year. That will be for a full-time service Monday to Friday, so you would need to fund a 10-session GP, plus cover, reception, admin and management, some nursing or HCAs, and then property costs and other running costs.’

In a statement, the local patient group said that the lack of applicants ‘raises the alarming prospect of losing vital, accessible medical care in the village’.

The Coniston Patient Group has been campaigning since 2014 to protect local GP services and also produced a recruitment video and set up a petition receiving over 1,000 signatures in support of keeping the surgery open.

Their statement said: ‘The group believes the ICB must urgently extend and widen the search for a replacement provider.

‘Allowing the service to disappear would create a cliff edge in patient care for Coniston and the surrounding rural communities, many of whom face long and difficult journeys to alternative surgeries.

‘There is also serious concern that the timing of the recruitment process undermined its success. Releasing the contract on 23 December, immediately before Christmas, is likely to have severely limited interest from potential applicants.’

The group is calling on the ICB to further extend the recruitment period and ‘actively’ seek new providers.

The statement added: ‘This community has fought for over a decade to keep its surgery. We have demonstrated overwhelming local support and a clear clinical need.

‘We will not accept the loss of our GP service without a renewed and determined effort to find a provider. Coniston deserves sustainable, local patient care – and we will fight on to secure it.’

The ICB told Pulse that the value of a GP contract is largely set nationally and that it will now consider options for how patients in the Coniston area can continue to receive GP services.

The ICB’s director of primary care Peter Tinson said: ‘We have unfortunately received no bids for the contract to provide general medical services at Coniston Medical Practice which was live on the Find A Tender portal from 23 December 2025 until 4 February 2026.

‘We allowed an additional two weeks over the standard 30 days for any interested parties to prepare their bid.

‘The ICB will now consider options for how patients in the Coniston area can continue to receive services and a decision will be taken in due course. We will provide an update on this as soon as we are able.

‘In the meantime, the practice will continue to run as it has under the management of the Morecambe Bay Primary Care Collaborative.’

Pulse has looked into the issues contributing to rural practices closing down in its award-winning Lost Practices investigation, which also mentioned Coniston medical practice, as the end of the minimum practice income guarantee (MPIG) had threatened it with closure.

Experts have recently recommended that the GP funding formula review currently being carried out by the Government should result in a ‘separate funding mechanism’ for rural practices.