GP PRACTICES are facing a doubling of management charges, medical magazine Pulse reported yesterday.
Those practices that cannot afford to pay will be subject to debt collectors, and, ultimately face closure. The charges are applied by NHS Property Services and have amounted in some cases to a staggering £70,000.
Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Local Medical Committee (LMC) confirmed that its practices are seeing their bills increase two-fold. One was being billed for management charges totalling £74,000, when the total cost of the premises was £264,000.
Pulse reported that a GP practice in South East England was sent a ‘final demand’ for a debt owing to NHS Property Services. The letter, dated earlier in September, warned that the debt would be referred to a ‘debt-collection agency’ unless the practice ‘contacted it within seven days’.
NHS Property Services manages 3,500 properties and comes under the government’s Department of Health and Tory secretary of state Hunt. Dr Peter Graves, chief executive of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire LMC, said: ‘Some practices have said they simply can’t afford to pay. It may potentially put practices out of business.’
NHS Property Services uses NHS Shared Business Services for ‘low level’ debt recovery. For straightforward cases of money owed, it sends ‘standard’ reminder letters at 45, 60 and 75 days. If money is still owed after 80 days NHS Property Services resumes responsibility for recovering it.
A spokesman for NHS Property Services said that having a lease between a ‘landlord and a tenant’ is ‘good professional practice’. The BMA is currently trying to negotiate a standard lease agreement with NHS Property Services, and said that it has been told that some practices are being ‘pressurised’ to sign leases.
Dr Brian Balmer, the BMA General Practitioners Committee (GPC) lead on premises lease negotiations, said: ‘We have told NHS Property Services that they need to get a grip on what is happening locally and ensure their staff are neither pressurising practices into signing agreements or putting out disinformation.’ The BMA is advising practices not to sign a new lease with NHS Property Services until it has clarified matters.
