New Contract Terms for GPs earning over £150,000

Every working individual in the UK must declare their earnings – nobody is exempt from doing so. There should be no loopholes and no opportunities for anyone to avoid the correct level of taxation. But has there been ‘non-disclosure’, just around the corner at your local GP surgery, and does anyone really know if this is the case, or are our local GPs simply being victimised?

GPs hold a position of trust and respect in their community and rightly so, but there has been a certain amount of controversy with the new tax implications that will be imposed upon our surgery doctors who earn in excess of £150,000 per annum. Even more controversial, is that the GPs falling into this bracket will be publicly named, in order to ‘increase transparency’, so the UK Government reports. This move is all part and parcel of a new 5-year GP contract, outlined by the NHS and the BMA, coming into effect in 2020. Currently, there is no fixed date as to when these transparency facts will become public knowledge, but it will be sometime in 2021.

The average national salary of a GP is around £105,000 per annum (current 2020), but according to statistics, a percentage of our GPs earn far more. Arguably, have the Government decided to target health professionals in order to boost the taxation pot?

At the moment, after legislation in 2016, GP surgeries are bound to reveal their earnings on their own websites for patients to see, but is this really of any use in terms of the provision of primary care? Surely, the main concern for patients is a diagnosis, care and any other remedial treatment that a GP would recommend.

Will this new legislation mean more workload for GPs?

GPs are under constant pressure to fulfil their obligations to patients and ensure that their care is kept at the right level. Will the new legislation mean that GPs must spend more time on paperwork, ensuring their declarations are submitted correctly, on time and ‘transparent’?

In a move to ease the burden on GP surgeries, and conveniently running concurrently with the new legislation, the NHS has reiterated the need for ancillary services to be provided by teams of paramedics, pharmacists and physiotherapists to take up the extra load, with consultation and other necessary medical services to be administered by them.

It would appear that over 20,000 extra staff will be provided under the new scheme, so that GPs can take more time with older patients and those that are more ill than others. It is anticipated that routine appointments will be taken over by these extra team members, at a cost of around £4.5m. The reasoning behind this is that patients will be seen earlier, live longer and ease the burden on both surgeries and hospitals. Home support care is also included in this package, in order to prevent ‘bed blocking’ by patients who cannot return home without dedicated care in place.

Hopefully, any extra time needed by a GP to ‘manage’ their accounts, will not be too burdensome, and that they can be allowed to do what they are supposed to – patient care.

This begs the question – is the extra funding expected to come from GPs who previously did not have to show such ‘transparency’? Are the NHS hoping that GPs who may not have been honest in their submissions will reveal a sudden wealth of extra tax that will appear in the budget? Surely there cannot be this amount of distrust in how doctors run their practices.

Is this really fair on GPs?

There are a multitude of GPs who work tirelessly for their patients, with long hours, house calls and even covering when emergency services/secondary care are not available. Any income earned by such GPs is not covered in the length of hours that they do, so the new scheme really poses a problem.

Equally so, revealing their income to the world really will not inspire anyone, let’s be honest. In fact, it will probably cause more discontent with patients who may already be disgruntled with their surgery and long waiting times.

Regional LMCs have differing views on the new ‘name and shame’ attitude adopted for the coming years. After all, nobody other than the GPs themselves know how much work they put in and the number of hours they work. There is also a thought that this can cause negative sentiment towards our local surgeries.

This ‘can of worms’ will continue to spill out for some time and could potentially result in GPs being accused of manipulating their tax affairs. The case is by no means closed and only time will tell.