NHS England has announced that the average pay figure of a GP in both private medical services (PMS) and alternative provider medical services (APMS) practices will be published next week in the first of a series of annual publications, although this year the figures will not be broken down to individual net pay.

The information is to be published on the Health and Social Care Information Centre’s website as part of NHS England’s transparency agenda, and will be accompanied by breakdowns of the type of staff at the practice, including numbers of full and part-time GPs.

As of next year, however, GPs will have to publish their individual net earning on their own websites under the new GP contract deal but only for contractual income from NHS England, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and local authorities. Income from premises, dispensing, private work and out of hours income will be exempt.

The General Practitioners’ Council (GPC) has agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to the information being published but has warned that it will neither be useful nor informative to patients, while critics of the publication have argued that it is a breach of GP’s privacy.

NHS England said in a statement that the Health and Social Care Information Centre would publish NHS payments on February 12 to individual providers of general practice services in England for 2013/14.

The bulletin added that this will be the first in a series of annual publications, as agreed by the Technical Steering Committee, membership of which includes the GPC. According to NHS England, the publication is in line with the NHS commitment to transparency and NHS England’s commitment to publish these details, which it considers are in the public interest, adding that publication also fulfils NHS England’s commitment to publish the payments.