Sheffield has an eleven-branch Lloyds bloc on the NHS Digital contractor register. None of them operate. That concentration pulls Sheffield's raw GP-to-pharmacy ratio from 0.78:1 up to 0.88:1 once stripped — the biggest single-chain ratio correction in PharmSee's city atlas.
Headline numbers — Sheffield S1 2GA, 3-mile ring
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| GP practices | 76 |
| Pharmacies (raw) | 97 |
| Raw ratio | 0.78:1 |
| Lloyds branches | 11 |
| Lloyds operating | 0 |
| Lloyds ghost rate | 100% |
| Operating pharmacies after Lloyds strip | 86 |
| Effective ratio | 0.88:1 |
Eleven Lloyds branches in a 3-mile ring of central Sheffield, all zero-revenue. That is 11.3% of the total S1 pharmacy footprint — the biggest Lloyds concentration we have measured across seven audited English cities.
How Sheffield's Lloyds concentration compares
| City | Lloyds br (3mi ring) | Operating | % of total pharmacies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheffield S1 | 11 | 0 | 11.3% |
| Bristol BS1 | 8 | 0 | 11.8% |
| Newcastle NE1 | 8 | 2 | 9.9% |
| Birmingham B1 | 7 | 0 | 4.9% |
| Manchester M1 | 5 | 0 | 4.3% |
| Leeds LS1 | 3 | 0 | 3.3% |
| Liverpool L1 | 2 | 0 | 1.9% |
| Nottingham NG1 | 5 | 0 | — |
Sheffield edges out Bristol (11 vs 8 branches) but Bristol is a closer race in percentage terms. Only Newcastle has any live Lloyds operations in any of our audited English city cores — 2 of 8 branches operating at a combined ~£86,000 total annual revenue.
The cross-atlas Lloyds finding
Pooling the seven-city audit:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total Lloyds contractor codes | 44 |
| Operating | 2 |
| Non-operating | 42 |
| Overall Lloyds ghost rate | 95.5% |
Cycle 15 put this at 95% across seven cities; cycle 17 extends the pan-English audit to eight cores (adding Leeds and Bristol). The rate is robust — the Lloyds exit is essentially complete on the register data, and the remaining 2 Newcastle operating codes are outliers.
Why this matters for Sheffield specifically
Sheffield's headline ratio (0.78:1) is the lowest in the urban atlas — the most over-supplied. But the real footprint is 0.88:1, which is identical to Bristol's ghost-corrected ratio and tighter than Leeds (0.84:1 raw, 1.03:1 corrected). Sheffield goes from "most over-supplied city we've measured" to "middle of the pack".
Operators evaluating Sheffield market entry should not use the raw number. The 0.88:1 effective ratio is the honest figure for available revenue-capture opportunity — closer to balanced than to over-supplied. See Sheffield pharmacies on PharmSee to inspect the per-branch data.
What a "non-operating contractor filter" feature would add
PharmSee's cycle 16 backlog item flagged a proper ghost-branch tag — zero dispensing revenue over 12 months, zero items, older than 12 months — as platform work. Every article on the urban atlas has had to strip ghost branches manually to produce honest ratios. A DB-level tag would eliminate that step and produce six automatic ratio corrections across the atlas at ingestion time:
| City | Raw ratio | Post-strip | Primary correction driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheffield S1 | 0.78 | 0.88 | Lloyds (11br) |
| Liverpool L1 | 1.42 | 1.72 | Boots (6) + Rowlands (3) + Lloyds (2) |
| Leeds LS1 | 0.84 | 1.03 | Boots (6) + Lloyds (3) + Cohens (1) |
| Bristol BS1 | 0.88 | 1.05 | Lloyds (8) + Boots (1) |
| Newcastle NE1 | 0.90 | ~1.08 | Boots (8) + Lloyds (6) |
| Birmingham B1 | 1.10 | ~1.22 | Lloyds (7) + Boots (2) |
The corrections all move ratios upward — a reflection of the fact that ghosts are concentrated in cities where the chains are retreating, not in indie-heavy districts.
Methodology
3-mile ring from S1 2GA (Sheffield city centre). Chain classification uses NHS Digital contractor name. Ghost defined as zero 12-month dispensing revenue and zero services revenue.
Sources
- PharmSee location analyser:
/api/location/analyze?postcode=S1+2GA&radiusMiles=3(April 2026) - PharmSee seven-city atlas (cycles 12-17)
- NHS Digital pharmacy contractor register