Britain's highest paid GP earns £700,000 a year from the NHS

Britain’s highest-earning GP is paid more than £700,000 a year, it has emerged.

The unnamed GP was one of more than 200 family doctors to earn more than £200,000 and is likely to run a group of surgeries responsible for tens of thousands of patients, it was reported by The Times.

According to the newspaper, a freedom of information request to the NHS Business Services Authority – to which GPs must report their NHS earnings to claim a pension – revealed that one doctor received between £700,000 and £799,000 from the NHS in 2015-16.

In the same year, which was apparently the most most recent for which figures were available, four GPs earned £400,000-499,000, 11 were paid £300,000-399,000 and 193 earned between £200,000 and £299,000. Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, was paid just under £195,000 last year.

The report has sparked a backlash against a system that critics claim allows GPs to set their own pay without any accountability and to run so-called ‘super practices’ with hundreds of thousands of patients that allow them to earn huge sums.

Alex Wild, research director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which obtained the data, told The Times it was “clear something is going badly wrong” with GPs’ pay.

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He said: “Few would begrudge paying doctors well, but it’s clear a minority are creating empires and raking in far more than could have been imagined by those who proposed the arrangements.

Rachel Power, chief executive of the Patients Association, told the newspaper that pay levels should be looked at in terms of patient experience, adding: “With resources so scarce, we would hope to see evidence that anyone who is remunerated particularly generously is providing a particularly good service.”

The British Medical Association reportedly said that the money earned by some GPs was not representative of most family doctors and was likely to be “an extremely small minority”.