Michael Howard is today to announce a major policy initiative to protect small community practices after this week’s reports in The Times of the threat posed by Labour plans for large “super-surgeries” throughout the country.

The Tories will pledge to make funding directly available to GPs to relieve the financial pressures on small surgeries, many of which are being forced to merge into much larger practices under Labour reforms. A “Save our GPs” petition is be sent to every constituency.

Doctors’ leaders this week gave warning that the current government policy would spell the end of the personal relationship between GPs and their patients so critical to people’s long-term care.

Labour plans, outlined by a policy adviser last month, suggest GPs being grouped together in practices of ten or more doctors, with an average of six surgeries per primary care trust. Other work would be carried out by the growing network of walk-in centres and specialist units. There are 31,500 GPs in England and Wales, based at 8,500 surgeries; this could drop to as few as 1,800 surgeries under the plans.

John Reid, the Health Secretary, insisted this week that the Government was pursuing policies that would result in “more GPs than ever before and more GP practices than ever before”. The Prime Minister emphasised that he was “not trying to get rid of basic family doctors”.

But the latest statistics indicate that the number of singlehanded GP practices in England fell by more than a quarter in 2004, with 600 closing or merging with larger practices. The drop — from 2,578 to 1,918 — was more than that in the entire previous decade.

Last year the total number of practices fell by 291 to 8,542 — the largest drop on record.

Doctors fear that a system based on larger practices will destroy the strong relationships built up between GPs and their communities and leave those in more remote areas with poorer access to care.

Health leaders admitted to The Times this week that some primary care trusts had unspoken policies to promote larger, more cost-effective group surgeries, such as providing better building refurbishments. Supporters of supersurgeries say that they will improve care by pooling medical expertise and make it easier to monitor GPs.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that the Tories would rescue the local, family-based GP with pledges to give doctors power over commissioning care and budgets. An additional £45 million per year will be used to improve out-of-hours care and allow GPs to hold Saturday-morning surgeries. “Labour’s plans to scrap small GP practices and undermine the role of GPs in managing their patient list have been exposed,” Mr Lansley said. “People have a clear choice: faceless super-surgeries which are only open during working hours under Mr Blair or the trusted local GP service with the Conservatives.”

Michael Taylor, of the Small Practices Association, welcomed the funding pledge and said that super-surgeries would create a depersonalised “factory line” of health care.

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