Silicon Practice Collapse Takes GP Websites Offline; NHS Warns on Data

Silicon Practice, a supplier of websites and online consultation tools to GP surgeries, has gone into administration, and hundreds of practices in England have lost their websites as a result. NHS bodies are now telling practices to secure their content, check who owns their web domains and line up a replacement, while NHS England has warned about the risk to patient data that sits outside clinical systems.

The company’s legal name is Schappit Ltd. According to a notice in The London Gazette, Richard Paul Rendle of Rendle & Co in Solihull was appointed administrator on 16 October, in a case heard at the High Court in Birmingham. The notice describes the business simply as a “software provider”.

How the Silicon Practice failure reached patients

For patients, the visible effect is a surgery website that no longer loads. NHS West and North London Integrated Care Board (ICB), writing for patients in west and north London, said 37 practices in its area use Silicon Practice for their websites and three use its online consultation platform. Brent alone has 15 affected practices; Camden, Enfield, Hammersmith and Fulham, Harrow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster are also listed.

“All affected practices remain open,” the ICB said. Practices will contact patients by text, email and phone with other ways to get in touch.

Its update for GP staff lists three services that are no longer accessible: the FootFall online consultation tool, practice websites and the chat bot feature.

Nationally, NHS England told the BBC that fewer than 500 practices were affected, which it described as under 10% of all practices. The BBC noted that every practice in England has had to offer online booking since last year, with more than 40% of appointments now made that way, and that the NHS App is still working. Digital Health reported that the firm ceased trading at 5.30pm on 27 October.

What NHS England and ICBs are telling practices

The ICB’s letter to practices, signed by its head of digital transformation, is blunt. “The ICB does not currently have confirmation of how long these services will remain available,” it says. Practices are asked to identify an alternative supplier now, take copies of their website content and account details, confirm who owns and renews their domain, and prepare messages for patients.

The cost falls on surgeries. The letter states that “responsibility for arranging and funding any website transition remains with the practice”, although the ICB offers procurement help.

NHS England has gone further on data. According to The Register, a letter from its chief technology officer, Kevin Humphries, asks practices to preserve historical patient information that is not held in clinical systems, manage any backlog of online consultations and keep channels open for patients. The Register says practices should consider informing the Information Commissioner’s Office if the “availability, integrity, confidentiality or recoverability of personal data” has been affected. The same report says Schappit was added to a government supplier framework in July.

A free open-source replacement, built in an afternoon

One GP-led response is already public. Marcus Baw, a GP and developer, has published an open-source GP practice website template on GitHub, describing it as “a free, open source website template that lets a GP practice put a safe, NHS-style website online in an afternoon, with an AI assistant doing the technical work.”

The template is built on the NHS.UK design system and hosted free on GitHub Pages. It has no forms, cookies or tracking, never collects patient information, and carries 999 and 111 messaging on every page. “Practices can deploy it for free, and take back in-house control of their own website,” Baw told The Register.

There are limits. The repository says the project “has not yet been tried end to end by a practice”, that it is “not an NHS England product, or endorsed by NHS England or any ICB”, and that it does not replace an online consultation or booking system. Setting it up relies on Claude Code on the web, which needs a paid Claude plan. Digital Health reported that another supplier, Simplify Primary Care, had restored 30 websites.

Concentration risk in GP digital suppliers

The Silicon Practice failure is a supply-chain problem, not a cyberattack, but the effect on patients looks similar: a front door that closes overnight. Several hundred practices relied on one small company for the page patients see first, and in some cases for the online consultation route that the NHS now expects them to offer. When that company stopped trading, there was no shared fallback, and each surgery has been left to find, fund and build its own.

The compliance exposure is real even without a breach. Under UK GDPR, losing access to personal data can count as a personal data breach, which is why NHS England’s wording about availability and recoverability matters. Practices that held consultation records or messages only on the supplier’s platform now need to show what they held, where it is and whether they can get it back.

The episode also lands as the government moves to bring managed service providers into scope of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. Recent cases, from police data suppliers to a trading platform halted by a third party, point the same way: resilience planning that stops at an organisation’s own walls misses the supplier that keeps its doors open. Approval for a government framework, as The Register notes, did not prevent this failure. Records handling was also the theme of TSN’s report on GCHQ’s removable media.

The domain is the practice’s lifeline

For any affected surgery, the most urgent item on the list is the domain name. A practice that controls its own web address can usually point it at a new site quickly. One that cannot faces a longer wait while the administrator works through the company’s assets.

Sources

• NHS West and North London ICB: Information for patients affected by GP practice website disruption (29 Oct 2026)
• NHS West and North London ICB GP site: Silicon Practice digital provider goes into administration (28 Oct 2026)
• NHS West and North London ICB: letter to practices on Silicon Practice websites (28 Oct 2026)
• The London Gazette: Schappit Ltd, Appointment of Administrators (27 Oct 2026)
• GitHub: open-gp-practice-website
• The Register: NHS quango warns of risk to GP patient data after website vendor collapse (30 Oct 2026)
• BBC News: GP websites offline after firm enters administration

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