I have worked in pharmacy for 20 years and nephews were asking me the same question. I told ALL of them NOT to do pharmacy unless they were really INTO it. When I did my pharmacy degree there were no tuition fees , and better career prospects, but if I was faced with the choice now, I would not want to pay £40k in tuition fees to do it. It is very saturated and a dying profession, wages are going down, sweat shop like conditions in community pharmacy where 75% of pharmacists end up working.
NHS long term plan is a joke. There have been many plans over the past 20 years for pharmacy, all have flopped. The new plan is get pharmacists into GP practices which may sound good, but you take on a massive responsibility in a very grey area of clinical practice for £36,000/yr (which you can get in community for basically being an checking technician which is very low risk) so the risks of patient harm are huge and they pay not enough to compensate. Many pharmacists are doing it though because it's better than the sweat shop conditions in community pharmacy. I too am working in GP practice but it's not all it's cracked up to be, it's a bit of a sweat shop in a different way - you have to do a certain amount of work per day, it's monitored, there's targets, patinets complain ..a lot when they don't get what they want, everyone refers all the rubbish stuff to you if it is slightly related to medicines (including the GPs). If you have IP, you will get pushed to prescribe in areas you don't know about/outside your scope because you're a cheaper prescriber than GPs, which is VERY HIGH risk, but I'm sure many newly qualified will do it willingly for the extra £1-2/hour on the locum rate even if they are not pushed into it.
Think about it very carefully, as the number of places doing pharmacy has doubled since I did it, now pharmacists are just being churned out by these new uni's who are hungry for tuition fees. This churning out will continue and if it's saturated now, what do you think it will be like in 5 years time when you qualify????? If I was in your position now, I would do optom every day of the week.