Health tourists cost the NHS £200million in five years - despite Government pledges to crack down on those abusing the system

Daily Mail​

20-07-2025

Health tourists have cost the NHS £200million during the past five years despite Government pledges to crack down on those abusing the system.
Hospitals are being deprived of more than £110,000 on average every day by people who fail to pay when they are not entitled to free treatments.
New figures obtained by the Sunday Express show the cost of providing care to these foreign citizens and former UK residents has continued to soar.
Conservative MP Peter Bedford said: 'I suspect the true cost of this type of health tourism is far higher and call upon the Department of Health to recoup these colossal sums of money in the interests of each and every British taxpayer.'
And Reform UK MP Lee Anderson said his party would 'shut down the 'health tourism' scam'.
He said: 'Successive Conservative and Labour governments have sold out the British taxpayer. If you want to use our NHS then take out private healthcare insurance before you arrive.
'It is called the National Health Service and not the international health service for a reason.'
It comes after a Mail on Sunday investigation, published in April, put the figure at £257million over the past five years.
The latest data, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, show that last year the bad debt was £40.9million – up 12 per cent on the figure of £36.5million the year before.
But this is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg as it only represents cases where invoices were generated and then not paid.
In many cases officials would not have issued a bill because they realised there was no prospect of being paid.
The Department of Health figures also exclude some of the major NHS trusts in urban areas that traditionally have the biggest issues with so-called health tourism.
From 2017 NHS trusts were supposed to start charging patients upfront for the cost of their care, so administrators did not have to chase them for payment afterwards.
However, there was an exception for patients needing emergency care, who could be billed afterwards.
Foreign travellers to the UK and former UK residents who return home after having settled abroad do not routinely get free treatment on the NHS.
The Government said its charging scheme should net an extra £500million for the NHS but a National Audit Office report said the money raised would fall far short of that target.
Most of the NHS trusts with the biggest outstanding debts for treatments are in London.
For the five year period, Barts Health Trust is owed £40.6million, King's College Hospital Trust £15.7million and Lewisham and Greenwich Trust £11million.
One of the highest profile cases of a foreign patient being unable to pay for their care was that of a Nigerian woman who was treated as an emergency case at St Mary's A&E, in London, after her plane stopped at Heathrow.
The woman, only identified at Priscilla, needed care for her unborn quadruplets and by the time she was discharged her bill had reached £330,000.
The Conservative Party's 2019 election manifesto said: 'We will clamp down on health tourism, ensuring that those from overseas who use NHS services pay their fair share.
'And we will increase the NHS surcharge paid by those from overseas.'
The issue was not mentioned in Labour's manifesto for the 2024 General Election, although it said it would create an extra 40,000 appointments every week paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.
Alp Mehmet, chair of Migration Watch UK, said: 'Health tourism has long been a costly problem that successive governments have shied away from.
Most of the NHS trusts with the biggest outstanding debts for treatments are in London
'Ministers are fully aware of its draining effect on the NHS. Wes Streeting would do himself and the NHS a power of good by getting on top of it.'
Mr Bedford, who was elected as the Tory MP for Mid Leicestershire last year, added: 'This is yet another example of 'soft touch Britain' costing the hard-pressed taxpayer millions of pounds each year.
'When British people find it hard to get a medical appointment, and we see tens of millions of pounds wasted on foreign health tourism, is it any wonder that the public have so little faith in public institutions like the NHS?'
Former Conservative Brexit minister David Jones, who now supports Reform UK, said: 'These figures highlight a real and ongoing problem.
'The NHS is a cherished national institution, but it 's not a free-for-all.
'Most people would agree that those not entitled to free care should be required to pay their way. It's only fair to taxpayers.
'The Government needs to ensure that the systems in place to recover these costs are actually working - otherwise trust in the system is undermined and valuable resources are diverted from British patients who genuinely rely on them.'