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. In particular, we don’t know if it was simply a promise to continue the growth in training places outlined in the previous government’s long-term workforce plan, or whether it means training more than that.

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 July 2025, the government said in its 10 Year Health Plan, “We will train thousands more [GPs] in the coming years”. It also said it would “over the next 3 years, create 1,000 new specialty training posts with a focus on specialties where there is greatest need”, informed by the Medical Training Review. But we don’t know how many of those posts, if any, will be in general practice, and 1,000 in three years is not “thousands more” in any case.

So we still don’t know exactly what was pledged or how it should be measured.

In particular, we 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.

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.

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

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.

The most recent update that we can find is a parliamentary answer in September 2025, in which the health minister Stephen Kinnock said: “From September 2025, we are increasing GP training places to 4,500 as part of a broader plan to expand training further by 2031. This increase is part of a larger National Health Service workforce plan to address projected GP shortages.”

There is no suggestion here that the government plans to go beyond the previous government’s plan to expand GP training places in the same way, which was announced in 2023.

There also appears to be a mistake in Mr Kinnock’s answer, which lists what it says are “the number of GPs in training grade in June of each year”. In fact the numbers in the table he supplied appear to be missing trainee GPs on rotation in hospitals, meaning the totals should be about 50% higher.

If it is a mistake, this is an easy one to make, because the government doesn’t actually publish 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.

Last year, however, we were able to obtain figures on the total number of trainee GPs since the election by submitting a Freedom of Information request.

NHS England responded to our FOI request to Health Education England with data showing that there were 14,865 people in its GP training programme on 1 December 2024, compared with 13,800 on 1 July, just before the election. This includes some trainees on parental leave, long-time sick or on other out-of-programme breaks.

The FOI figures also showed that on 1 September 2024, the total reached ​​15,546, which is nearly “thousands” more than in July, when Labour took office—although this reflects the large rise in new starters that happens every August.

We have asked the DHSC about Mr Kinnock’s parliamentary answer, but at the time of writing we have not received a reply.