Upcoming GDC ARF Meeting – GDPUK Looks At The Regulator’s Track Record

Upcoming GDC ARF Meeting – GDPUK Looks At The Regulator’s Track Record

Tomorrow, the Council of the GDC will be meeting to decide on the regulator’s budget, reserves policy and most importantly for registrants, the Annual Retention Fee levels for 2022.  GDPUK takes a look at the GDC’s recent approach to its spending and thriftiness.

Last week, the Chair of the General Dental Council’s Finance and Performance Committee Terry Babbs, wrote an article on the GDC website about the regulator’s ‘Considerations when setting our budget and the ARF.’

Alarm bells ring for the status quo of the ARF when Mr Babbs wrote in a rather understated way “As we, society, and dentistry recover from the pandemic, I anticipate that we will have a bigger work programme than in previous years, and a higher budget in 2022 than in 2021.’

Was he gently easing into the consciousness of any visitors who stumbled on to the regulator’s website, that they should prepare for an inevitable rise in the ARF?

After all, in 2020, former GDC Chair Dr William Moyes had outlined what a precarious financial state the GDC was in.

Dr Moyes issued a statement on the ARF after members of the profession, particularly dental care professionals, called for a temporary reduction in the ARF or at the very least, the immediate introduction of a Payment by Instalment scheme, during the national dental shutdown.

It seemed the GDC couldn’t possibly countenance such moves in view of the fact that in financial terms “Significant uncertainty remains about the months ahead and it is just too early to predict what is going to happen – to the sector as a whole or to the GDC.”

Dr Moyes made much of the fact that the work the GDC has to do “Which is laid down in law, has not fundamentally changed.”

“We are required to remain financially stable and to meet our statutory obligations to ensure the public are protected and confidence in the professions is maintained,” he said.

But ‘significant uncertainty’ didn’t stop the GDC deciding at its May 2020 Council meeting, to authorise the use of the staff payroll budget to top up the furlough payments to 80% of staff salaries, where those salaries were higher than the Government cap.

And that was the SAME meeting at which the GDC Council took the decision NOT to introduce a PBI scheme or reduce the ARF.

The minutes of the meeting even noted that, “If a decision not to implement the (emergency) scheme was taken, this would have an adverse effect on the work done to build relationships with this area of the profession.”

But despite upsetting the most financially stretched members of the profession, the GDC decided against  introducing an emergency PBI scheme anyway.

Amazingly, despite the fact the GDC’s finances had not increased significantly and there had, (despite the GDC’s insistence that figures were ‘stable’), a marked reduction in registrations – particularly among dental nurses – the GDC suddenly found its financial uncertainty had been eliminated adequately enough to be in a position to  introduce a PBI scheme, firstly for DCP’s and then for dentists.

In his June post-Council update published on the GDC website in July, Dr Moyes actually wrote “Almost 10% of dental care professionals selected this option by the deadline of 31 May.”

Without irony, Dr Moyes said “Speaking personally, that seemed rather low, as the scheme aims to support dental professionals who pay their own fee by enabling them to spread the cost over the year with quarterly direct debits.”

Perhaps the uptake would have been far greater had the GDC introduced it when it was desperately needed, rather than a year later. (In the late Spring of 2020, GDPUK learned of colleagues who offered to fund a desperate nurse’s ARF payment, in July).  

To add insult to injury, in  the GDC’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2020, the regulator said “A new project to understand the feasibility of a temporary payment by instalments scheme for Annual Retention Fee (ARF) payments was completed…“this was something we chose not to introduce in 2020…”

But the decision to top-up staff furlough salaries will almost inevitably lead to additional unplanned legal costs for the  GDC after it decided to appeal against a decision by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The regulator refused an instruction by the ICO to disclose an email sent by Dr Moyes to colleagues regarding the top-up decision after a Freedom of Information Request (FOI) by Leeds GDP Dr Dominic O’Hooley.

In its defence, the GDC plumped for an appeal rather than waiting for the ICO to take it to the High Court, which presumably would have the GDC more legal fees, though complying with the ICO would have been more in keeping with regulatory ‘transparency’ the GDC proclaims to be fond of.  

It was without doubt not a good year for the GDC financially this year, when it  also paid out around £38,000 in legal fees (from the ARF of course) and costs after it admitted ‘acting unlawfully’ to Dental Protection, after an under guise investigation of a clinical technician.

The private investigators had tried to induce the registrant to act out of his scope of practice to treat an imaginary housebound relative.  

After this episode, the GDC will presumably reduce or hopefully eliminate its use of private investigators. The cost of the GDC’s use of private investigators between 2013 and 2019, totalled £59,258.85 – but don’t bank on it.

In its decision-making on Thursday, the GDC will presumably also have to factor-in the possibility of other unplanned expenses, similar to those they have incurred over the past two or three years.  

Unplanned legal expenses were incurred when the GDC went to the High Court after the Professional Standards Authority took action against the regulator for reinstating a fraudulent dentist after the GDC withheld evidence from its own Professional Conduct Committee.  

But the GDC will have that sort of anticipated unplanned expense covered with an ARF hike, presumably.

What the GDC terms as ‘unplanned’ is somewhat surprising though.

In its accounts for 2020 under the subsection entitled ‘Unplanned and additional work undertaken in 2020,’ the GDC said “We had to make changes to our rules and processes in response to the end of the transitional period of the UK’s exit from the European Union,” despite the fact the UK has been preparing for its inevitable exit from the EU since 2016.

The GDC of course also engaged an outside recruitment consultancy to find a replacement for  its outgoing Chair.

The cost of this process is not known, nor is the tally from commissioning a research company to carry out a “New survey to understand on-going impacts of COVID-19 on dental professionals.”

The GDC had previously carried out  recent similar research, resulting in it producing “ Mental Health and Wellbeing in Dentistry: A Rapid Evidence Assessment.”

The commissioning of such research appears to fly in the face of the retiring Chair’s last blog post in September in which he said “It is not the GDC’s role to support the dental professions. This is the job of the Government or the representative bodies.”

Only the GDC knows how much regulatory work it has working its way through the interminably slow investigatory pipeline, and it’s anyone’s guess as to how many surprise legal bills it will face during the next few years. 

It can only be hoped that new GDC chair Lord Toby Harris has a firm hand on the regulatory tiller, though with no mention of finances in his first blog whatsoever, it might be worth hanging around the lifeboats, just in case.

[Image by Сергей Игнацевич from Pixabay]

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