PharmSee's cycle-16 re-audit of the L1 1JJ 3-mile ring found 12 Boots contractor codes inside the Liverpool city-centre catchment. Six of those codes produced £0 dispensing revenue over the reporting period. That is a 50% Boots ghost rate in the one city-centre ring that most operators benchmark against. Six "branches" that don't dispense are not operating pharmacies — they are contractor codes lingering on the NHS Digital register, probably from historical Liverpool estate moves that the register has not yet pruned.

The L1 1JJ 3-mile audit

The overall ghost rate in L1 sits at 17.9%. That is already distorting — but the distribution is far from uniform. The chains carry the vast majority of the ghost weight, and Boots carries the single largest ghost bloc at six branches.

Why 50% ghosts matters for urban ratios

The raw L1 1JJ 3-mile GP-to-pharmacy ratio is 150 GP / 106 pharm = 1.42:1. That is the figure that appears in most PharmSee urban-core comparisons. But 19 of those 106 pharmacies are contractor ghosts — zero-revenue codes that do not dispense a single item. If you strip the ghosts and recompute on operating branches only, the effective ratio becomes 150 / 87 = 1.72:1.

The difference between 1.42 and 1.72 is the difference between an "urban floor" narrative and an "urban pressure" narrative. Liverpool looks average on the raw register and under-supplied once the ghosts are pulled out. That is a material analytical difference for anyone benchmarking Liverpool against the other large English city cores.

Why does Boots have six L1 ghosts?

Boots took a series of Liverpool estate decisions between 2020 and 2024 — closures, consolidations, and the large-format store rationalisation that shuttered roughly one-in-twelve of the Boots UK community pharmacy footprint. Historic contractor codes stay on the NHS Digital register until they are either formally surrendered or reassigned. Six L1 Boots ghosts is consistent with the pace of that consolidation and the lag in register housekeeping.

The six operating L1 Boots branches that remain average £102,970 in dispensing revenue each — a respectable figure but well below the Tesco-pharmacy L1 average of £166,567 per operating branch and below the L1 independent operating average of £121,301. Boots is not the revenue leader in the Liverpool city-centre catchment; it is the middle-tier national chain sharing the catchment with an independent-majority market that dispenses more per head.

The Boots ghost rate is not uniform across cities

PharmSee's cycle-15 seven-city audit put the Boots ghost rate at 50% in Liverpool L1, 53% in Newcastle NE1 (9 of 17 codes), 50% in Nottingham NG1 (5 of 10), 40% in Plymouth PL1 (4 of 10), 25% in Birmingham B1 (2 of 8), 12.5% in Manchester M1 (1 of 8), and 11% in Sheffield S1 (1 of 9). The concentration is North East / Merseyside / East Midlands. The West Midlands and Yorkshire estates are substantially cleaner.

This matters because any national "Boots has N UK branches" claim averages across a non-uniform ghost distribution. A proper regional correction uses the per-city ghost rate, not a single national adjustment factor. For a city like Liverpool, half of the Boots contractor codes in the city core are not dispensing — and any analyst reading the raw register without that correction is over-counting Boots by a factor of two in the inner city.

What operators should do about it

Three practical implications:

• Site-selection diligence: when benchmarking a new-entry city-core site, strip ghost branches before computing local density. The Liverpool L1 effective density (87 operating pharmacies across 3 miles) is substantially thinner than the raw 106-branch figure suggests.
• Chain-share claims: claims like "Boots has X% of the Liverpool market" need to be computed on operating branches (6 of 87 = 6.9%), not on contractor codes (12 of 106 = 11.3%). The direction of the error is consistent — raw register figures systematically overstate chain share and understate independent share.
• Pharmacy First planning: the £6,000 Pharmacy First ceiling per operating site applies to the operating count, not the contractor-code count. Liverpool's realistic PF revenue capacity is 87 × £6,000 = ~£522k per year, not 106 × £6,000 = ~£636k.

Use PharmSee to check your own catchment

PharmSee's location analyser returns every contractor code and its dispensing revenue within the specified radius. Any code with £0 revenue for 12 months should be treated as a ghost. Our Liverpool pharmacy pillar covers the city-wide independent-majority finding, and our Newcastle atlas has the NE1 ghost-rate comparison.

Takeaway

Liverpool L1 has 12 Boots contractor codes, 6 of which don't dispense — a 50% Boots ghost rate in the Merseyside urban core. Correcting for ghosts pulls the L1 effective GP-to-pharmacy ratio from 1.42:1 up to 1.72:1. That is a materially under-supplied city core once you filter out the register noise, and it changes how Liverpool compares to Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham on any catchment-density league table.

Measurement: PharmSee location analyser, L1 1JJ centre, 3-mile radius, cycle 16 — 11 April 2026.