THOUSANDS of people may not be able to see a GP in Wantage and Grove after a request for NHS funding was turned down.

The two GP practices at Wantage Health Centre – Church Street and Newbury Street – applied for the £4m from NHS England to expand their shared building on Mably Way.

The new space would be essential if the surgeries are to take on more than 12,000 new residents as 5,000 homes are built in Wantage and Grove over the next 15 years.

Both practices have worked with NHS England on the bid for years, but last week were told the funding was not coming.

Newbury Street practice manager Bob Lewis said: "NHS England have said for whatever reason they haven't got the finances to do it.

"I think they've just changed their whole criteria.

"Clearly it's not good news and we need to do something, but we don't know what."

Mr Lewis said both practices are already operating at capacity, without the room to take on more patients.

Newbury Street has 15,500 patients and Church Street 18,500.

Even if they could recruit more clinicians, there is not enough room in the building for them to work.

Mr Lewis said: "We've got to the stage where we can't have any more staff even if we needed them.

"We really need this expansion now."

The land on which Wantage Health Centre is built is owned by a private healthcare company Assura and the two GP practices pay rent.

In order to expand, they need NHS funding.

A recently as August this year, Newbury Street parter Dr Rhodri Davies told the Wantage Herald that the expansion plans had gone to NHS England for final approval and he hoped the 12-month construction would start next year.

Now that plan has been scuppered.

He said the problem of where to find funding had now been passed to Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (OCCG) – the county-wide group GPs who commission all health services in Oxfordshire – hospitals, mental health care and general practice.

Mr Lewis is retiring at the end of this week but his replacement, Karen Fido, said the issue would be at the top of her list of priorities.

NHS England declined to comment.

At a meeting of Oxfordshire's Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee last week, OCCG directors admitted there was a national problem with funding general practice and that it could not continue in its current form.

Clinical chairman Dr Joe McManners said smaller practices would have to close and GPs merge together into a shrinking number of centralised hubs catering for more and more patients.

Newbury Street became a model of this aspiration earlier this year by taking on 4,000 extra patients from Grove Health Centre after it closed in February.