THE ERIC RECKONING · Article 5 of 8
The Primary Care Black Hole: The Half of the NHS Estate ERIC Cannot See
NHS Estate Directors · FM Suppliers · Primary Care Networks · Integrated Care Boards · Framework Bodies
ERIC covers secondary care only. The community estate where the government's 10 Year Health Plan intends to shift the majority of NHS activity is entirely absent from the data. The shift to community is not just a policy. It comes with £426 million of dedicated capital funding and a productivity mandate tied to estate utilisation. If you are an FM supplier, you are bidding into a market with 100% policy priority and 0% data visibility.
What ERIC covers and the half it does not
ERIC is a mandatory return for NHS trusts and ambulance trusts providing NHS funded secondary care. That scope was appropriate when ERIC was designed and when NHS estate policy was dominated by the acute hospital sector.
The policy environment has shifted fundamentally. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan commits to a neighbourhood health service with local multidisciplinary hubs reducing reliance on hospital outpatients. The Capital Guidance provides £426 million over four years through the Utilisation and Modernisation Fund, with up to half expected to support 40 to 50 neighbourhood health centres this Parliament. The longer term ambition is a centre in every community, supported by a combination of capital investment, disposals, and repurposed estate.
Every pound of that £426 million is going into an estate that ERIC cannot see. The community buildings being refurbished, the GP premises being upgraded, the mental health facilities being expanded, are invisible in the primary dataset the NHS uses to plan and evaluate estate investment. By building count, ERIC covers roughly half of the physical NHS estate. By the strategic direction of the 10 Year Health Plan, it covers the half the system is moving away from.
If you are a supplier positioning for the community health shift, you are preparing for a market with 100% policy priority and 0% national data infrastructure. ERIC tracks hospital floorboards. The community estate where the shift will actually happen is drowning in disputed invoices and invisible decay.
What the evidence shows about the primary care estate
In the absence of an ERIC equivalent for primary care, the picture is assembled from surveys, reviews, and one off assessments. Lord Darzi’s 2024 independent review found that 20% of the GP estate predates the founding of the NHS in 1948. More than half is over 30 years old. The BMA’s 2025 premises survey found that 83% of GPs consider their premises unsuitable for future needs and over 70% of the surveyed estate is more than 25 years old.
The BMA’s 2025 survey also found that 65% of NHS Property Services tenants received incorrect service charge invoices in the prior year. This matters beyond the individual billing dispute. The ERIC data definitions require trusts occupying NHS Property Services managed premises to obtain service charge data from their landlord to complete their return. Where commercial in confidence applies, trusts are told to provide a reasonable estimate. If the invoices themselves are disputed and incorrect, the estimates derived from them are unreliable. ERIC is, in those cases, collecting estimates of figures that neither the tenant nor the landlord can confirm with confidence.
The King’s Fund, in its commentary on the ERIC data, noted that what we know about the primary care estate is often pieced together from surveys, one off reports, and anecdotes. That description from one of the most respected health policy organisations in the UK is a polite way of saying: there is no systematic national data. One staff toilet shared by 35 people. Ligature points in mental health facilities. Practices in converted houses with no scope for expansion. These are not edge
cases in the primary care estate. They are the typical condition of an estate that has had no mandatory annual reporting, no systematic national condition assessment, and no capital allocation mechanism equivalent to what ERIC provides for acute trusts.
The capital allocation gap
The 2026/27 Capital Guidance allocates £122 million per year to primary care capital through ICBs on a weighted population basis. Against a BMA survey finding that 83% of GPs regard their premises as unfit for the future, and against the scale of the secondary care capital programme, £122 million per year is a modest allocation for an estate with no systematic condition data to make
the capital case.
The dynamic is self reinforcing. Because primary care has no ERIC equivalent, it has no nationally consistent condition data. Because it has no nationally consistent condition data, it cannot make the evidence based capital case that acute trusts make through their ERIC CIR scores. Because it cannot make that case systematically, it receives less capital per unit of estate than the secondary care sector. Because it receives less capital, its condition deteriorates. And because that deterioration has no systematic national record, the scale of the problem remains invisible in the data that policymakers use to plan capital investment.
The government is simultaneously shifting NHS activity to community settings and underfunding the capital intelligence infrastructure for those settings. Both are happening at the same time. The £426 million Utilisation and Modernisation Fund is real money going into a real problem. But the decisions about where that money goes are being made without the kind of systematic estate condition data that ERIC provides for acute hospitals.
What this means for FM suppliers
For FM suppliers positioning for the community health shift, the absence of primary care from ERIC creates a specific intelligence problem. The market opportunity is substantial. If the neighbourhood health centre programme, the shift of outpatient activity to community settings, and the expansion of mental health community provision materialise at the scale the 10 Year Health Plan intends, the FM requirement for those community buildings will represent significant contract volumes.
The data infrastructure that FM suppliers use to understand and price NHS work, ERIC condition data, backlog figures, contracted out percentages, running cost benchmarks, covers none of the estate where that opportunity will emerge. You cannot use ERIC to understand a market that ERIC
does not cover.
Baachu Rain tracks 11,000 plus UK FM contracts including NHS and primary care adjacent contracts. The contract level intelligence that Baachu provides for NHS FM sits in the layer ERIC cannot reach for any estate type, but the gap is most acute for primary care, where ERIC provides nothing and contract level market data is the primary available intelligence source.
The risk
FM market strategy and capital planning designed around the NHS shift to community care is
being developed without any data infrastructure equivalent to ERIC for the estate where that shift
will actually occur. The market opportunity is real and it is large. The data to understand and price
it does not yet exist in systematic form.
Working in NHS FM procurement, estate strategy or contract delivery?
Baachu Rain is the UK’s only dedicated FM market intelligence platform, tracking 11,000 plus contracts worth £49.2 billion including a substantial NHS estate subset. Our intelligence sits in the layer ERIC cannot reach. hello@baachu.com · baachurain.com
Next in the series · Article 6 of 8
Insourcing, Outsourcing and the FM Market Picture ERIC Cannot Give You
This article represents Baachu’s independent analysis based on publicly available information, including NHS England ERIC publications and data quality statements. Baachu Works Limited has no commercial relationship with NHS England, NHS Property Services, or any FM provider, NHS trust, or estate services firm referenced in this series. This article is not legal or financial advice.