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One sentence in an article published this month by The Health Foundation on Labour’s determination to bring the NHS under closer political control jumped out at me.

‘The government’s latest 10-year health plan was really a plan for the NHS, not a coherent strategy for improving the nation’s health,’ wrote Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster and Dr Hugh Alderwick. ‘The government doesn’t have a coherent strategy for pharmacy, so it’s not much of a plan for the NHS,’ I thought.

The article provided a whistle-stop tour of what it described as “an almost endless cycle of reforms to the management of the health service”, beginning in the early 1970s. It’s an interesting read (Bringing NHS England back under closer political control: lessons from history).

The doctors cogitated on the plan and suggested the past has shown it is not “possible or desirable” to reform the NHS if you take the politics out of it. There are compelling arguments for and against NHS England’s abolition but Labour should have the decency to give us more meat on the bones if it wants to subject the health service to political intervention.

Take its vaunted neighbourhood health centres. Keir Starmer lauded them as community hubs that will house pharmacists, nurses, doctors, dentists, carers, even debt advisers and employment support workers “all under one roof”.

Who will lead these centres? GPs? Pharmacists, dare I say? If the hubs are bricks-and-mortar, when will they be built by? “It might be a question of bringing a community pharmacy into a virtual centre,” National Pharmacy Association chief executive Henry Gregg recently told me.

Whatever form the centres take, how will they avoid duplicating work pharmacists already do in their communities? How will ‘neighbourhood health centre pharmacists’, or NHCPs, be funded for a lot of extra work given Labour wants to increase their role in long-term condition management and vaccinations?

Where will NHCPs come from? Community, general practise or hospital pharmacy or a mix of all three? Perhaps newly qualified pharmacists will be sent into these hubs.

Pertinently, will the plan negate harmful competition between GPs and pharmacists? Questions, questions, questions. Any answers Labour?

Neil Trainis is the editor of Independent Community Pharmacist.