SOME National Health Service dentists are earning up to £250,000 a year in fees as demand for those who have remained in the public sector increases, new figures show.

Other official statistics reveal that the gap in average earnings between NHS dentists and their private counterparts has narrowed to just £800 a year.

A top 50 list of the biggest gross earnings by NHS dental practices has been released by the Dental Practice Board for England and Wales under the Freedom of Information Act.

At the top is a surgery in the West Midlands with 26 dentists, which took £2.2m in gross fees last year. Six dentists at a practice in Essex took £1.6m in fees, equivalent to £267,732 for each dentist before their overheads were taken into account.

But the most successful per head is a practice in West Yorkshire run by two principal dentists, which took £1.4m over the same period.

The board refuses to name individual surgeries but it is believed to be the Park View dental practice in Huddersfield, set up in 2002 by two partners, Majid Ishan and Samir Khan. They employ nine assistant dentists.

At a time when people have found difficulty obtaining an NHS dentist, this surgery has welcomed new NHS patients as well as private clients. Last week the practice did not return calls and a fax asking it to confirm its gross fees.

Another area of limited NHS cover is Hull. The east of the city has the fourth worst dentist provision in the country, with just two qualified dentists for every 10,000 patients. John Prescott, the deputy prime minister and MP for Hull East, revealed he was having trouble finding an NHS dentist because his own practitioner was only taking private patients.

Those NHS dentists who remain in the city are making substantial earnings. One practice with eight dentists took £1.37m in fees; another with seven earned £1.32m.

Another dentist in the city, Mohammed Jan, has been able to afford a Porsche and a Ferrari in succession and an apartment in the fashionable Spanish resort of Puerto Banus. “I am just trying to earn a living,” he said last week.

Britain has 32,000 registered dentists, of whom about 24,000 are practising. Nearly all do both private and NHS work. The British Dental Association estimates there are only between 300 and 500 dentists who solely carry out private work.

But other dentists who have “gone private” limit their NHS work to children of private patients — those under 18 are exempt from NHS fees — or even their own relatives. They have to perform one NHS consultation every six months to keep their place on the dental register. Others treat their existing health service patients but close their surgeries to new ones.

NHS dentists usually offer private work, especially when patients want white crowns on back teeth in place of the amalgam versions available on the health service.

In practice, there is little difference in earnings between NHS and private dentists. A report by the government’s Health and Social Care Information Centre claims the net average income of dentists with low health service commitments in 2003-4 was £80,590 compared with £79,790 for highly committed NHS dentists.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth