GPs are not cashing in on asylum seekers

The real scandal is not that asylum seekers attract extra funding, but that general practice is not properly resourced to look after anyone – British or otherwise, argue editor Sofia Lind and features assistant Maya Dhillon.

GB News recently claimed that GPs are ‘prioritising illegal migrants’ over British patients. Their report suggested this was happening across the NHS, and presented a series of supposed scandals: that GPs are paid £150 per asylum seeker compared with just £49 per diabetes patient; that asylum seekers are given 30-minute appointments; and that they are prioritised for referrals while British patients wait.

Their report painted a picture of money-obsessed GPs bumping asylum seekers up the queue while British patients wait. This policy didn’t ring a bell to any of us in the Pulse team, so we set out to find out where GB News got their mystery document from.

When we asked NHS England and the DHSC, neither recognised the information. It took us some time to trace it back – to a single locally-commissioned service in North West London, rather than a wide-ranging national policy.

To give GB News their due, the enhanced service in North West London does provide extra funding for asylum seekers. If your starting point is that migrants should not be here at all, then yes – you will see that as money wasted.

But this debate has turned toxic. Only last week, the Prime Minister used his Instagram account to post a dehumanising series of images of young Black men, faces blurred, being fingerprinted under a promise to send them away.

Wherever you stand on immigration, the fact remains: people have a legal right to seek asylum. And once they are here, it is in everyone’s interest that they are vaccinated, screened for TB and other conditions, and supported with their health needs. Otherwise, the problems will spill into A&E and the wider system.

If there was no enhanced service, GPs would still be expected to treat patients at the point of need, without asking about immigration status, and without the proactive service provided in the NWL asylum seeker ES – for which GPs are given additional funding – this extra workload would take resources from other patients.

The additional resource for asylum seeker services is not about queue-jumping or creating a ‘two-tier’ NHS. It is about recognising patient need, as any good healthcare system does. Caring for asylum seeker patients is complex – longer appointments and extra funding simply reflect that reality.

Let’s also look at GB News’ assumption that GPs would be choosing to treat asylum seekers over their British patients because they get paid more. As Pulse has reported before when covering NWL’s single enhanced services package, practices cannot pick and choose. They must either sign up to the entire lot or not at all. 

And GPs in NWL have no choice over whether there is asylum seeker accommodation in their area. They are simply asked to deliver care to the population in front of them – as they always have been.

The real scandal is not that asylum seekers are being given an enhanced service. It is that GPs are not funded to properly look after anyone – British or otherwise. General practice has been asked to do more with less year after year, while governments prefer to focus on targets – the latest row about core-hour access being a case in point – rather than properly resourcing GMS services.

People are right to be angry about the state of access to care. But the anger should not be directed at migrants, who are simply patients in need, nor at GPs, who are doing their jobs under extraordinary strain. It should be directed at a Government that refuses to fund primary care properly – while allowing scapegoating and dehumanisation to fill the gap.