The annual fee paid by doctors to stay licensed with the General Medical Council (GMC) will increase by £5 next year from £420 to £425. For doctors who are registered without a licence the fee will rise by £2 to £152.
There are currently 273,853 registered doctors in the UK, (statistics on 7 December 2015), meaning that the fee will generate more than £116 million for the GMC (£116,387,525).
The GMC receives 90% of its income from the annual retention fee paid by doctors.
“We are determined to be good stewards of our registrants’ money – which is why we need to ensure our income keeps up with our expenditure but also continue to cut our costs,” Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC explained.
The Council is embarking on a “major change programme” to reduce costs, including moving 130 posts from London to Manchester and reforming staff pension benefits. The aim is to save up to £6 million a year by 2018.
However, most of the increase to the annual retention fee (£736,000) will cover the first full year of the levy imposed by the government on the GMC to fund the work of the Professional Standards Authority.
Medical school graduates fee to become provisionally registered with the GMC will be frozen at £90, and the fee to move from provisional to full registration will be kept at £200. The fees for the postgraduate Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT) have also been frozen at £420.
Doctors on incomes below £32,000 a year will still be eligible for a 50% discount.
Dickson added that overall the GMC is in “good financial health and it is important that we stay that way. Like other organisations in healthcare, we are in a challenging financial environment”.
