The fees charged to GP practices by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) are set to rise by 2.5 per cent from April 2014, but could double in years to come as the organisation aims to recover the costs of regulation from registration fees.

The CQC has launched a consultation on the fees it proposes to charge health and social care providers in 2014/15, with other proposals including changing the bandings for residential care home services to reduce certain “cliff edge effects” in the current bands and to introduce a measure to differentiate single location dental providers by the size of their practice.

If the 2.5 per cent increase goes through, it will mean that registration fees will be set at £565 to £875 for GP practices with one branch, depending on the number of patients registered there. Meanwhile, practices with multiple branches will pay from £1,230 to £15,375 depending on the number of locations.

The CQC is currently given a £31 million grant-in-aid from the Department of Health, but has been instructed by ministers that it must move towards a model in which it recoups all the costs of regulation from providers. At the moment the watchdog has admitted that it only recovers half the costs of regulation from their fees.

The CQC’s impact assessment said that where the costs of regulating a sector new to registration are not yet fully known, such as in the dental and primary medical care sectors, its policy has been to set fees at an anticipated 50 per cent of full cost recovery and then raise them once these costs and data to support this are more fully known.

The watchdog is asking interested parties to take part in the consultation either online or by sending in an email or letter, with the consultation closing on Monday 25 November 2013.