27 March 2025
NHS optical voucher values will remain frozen at 2024 levels for the year ahead, it has been confirmed.
The Optometric Fees Negotiating Committee described the move as a “squeeze” on primary eye care that would have the most impact on children and vulnerable adults.
In a letter for optical professionals, Alette Addison, deputy director for pharmacy and eye care services at the Department of Health & Social Care, set out the NHS optical voucher values and hospital eye service maximum charges from 1 April 2025.
NHS optical voucher values will remain at the levels set in spring last year.
In the hospital eye service, the fees outlined in the NHS (Charges for Optical Appliances) Directions 2024 remain in force.
This means maximum charges will remain £75.85 for single vision glasses, £123.34 for other lenses for glasses, and £61.77 per contact lens.
Paul Carroll, chair of the OFNC, commented: “This a further squeeze on primary eye care, this time on patients. Contractors will continue to do all they can to support patients but it is a false economy which will impact most on children and vulnerable adults and lead over time to more NHS repairs and replacements.”
Negotiating on behalf of the optometry profession
New OFNC chair, Paul Carroll, and secretary, Peter Hampson, give OT an insight into the work that goes on behind the scenes
Comments (13)
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Anonymous12 April 2025
It really is quite simple: If you work for a multiple who offers cut-price sight tests, then don't. Stop working for a week and watch the meltdown. It's your company's ridiculous loss-leader model to get punters in the door to rip them off with glasses they don't need that fuels this underpayment.
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Anonymous08 April 2025
The freeze in voucher values is very disappointing. I no longer supply spectacles covered by the voucher. I explain to the patient that even though prices have gone up the voucher value hasn’t.
As a profession we only have ourselves to blame, if companies are willing to do eye examinations for £10 or less and supply £15 spectacles, or OCT included in the price of an NHS eye exam, then the NHS do not have to pay anymore than this.
We cannot complain that we don’t get paid enough like the pharmacies have because a Company with approx 45% - 50% market share is carrying out reduced price eye examinations and spectacles even though prices and national insurance contributions have increased and wages have gone up and the patients are also feeling the squeeze.
The NHS also are reducing what we get paid for enhanced schemes and the local LOCs are fearful that these schemes will be lost to a tendering system if they don’t agree.
Locum staff are now finding that their daily pay is now being reduced and wages are being reduced in new jobs.
The sight test fee will probably not alter much either.
Hasn’t someone started a union for Optometrists!
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Anonymous29 March 2025
NHS England, ICBs and Hospitals expect us to triage patients far in excess of what the GOS contract requires, we need one of the professional bodies to become a union, like the BMA, then mobilise us to work to rule, referring everything that the patients will not self fund, only when the HES is stuffed will they realise how much work we actually did for them, then its up to them to find the funding as they did with junior doctors working to rule.
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Anonymous29 March 2025
Easier said than done Nick. Charging extra fees in my practice is impossible and I rely on the voucher values to make it all work. One day last month I conducted 12 NHS sight tests with a really unlucky day where there were no dispenses. TO = £280. Out of this I had to pay my rent, rates energy and 2.5 support staff. And had one burnt out practice owner. Charging £30 for extra scans etc in my place is not an option. Yes this was an unlucky day. But an NHS practice should be able to support its self on GOS fees excluding voucher fees. Hard to get Optoms in my area. The lower end of the profession is in the worst state I can remember. I heard a dentist can still make £80k flat out on NHS. No chance in optometry.
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Anonymous29 March 2025
Free eye tests dished out, contact lenses supplied by online companies with expired prescriptions of more than 4 years plus! Spectacles sold online from websites where at the other end is non optical professional taking orders and dispensing. No optical qualifications and dispense.?
Where and what is GOC doing about all this? Paying GOC fees as a professional. What are they exactly doing? if you raise a complaint you will be told they need to see the evidence. This profession and what is happening in reality is an absolute joke. About time the GOC as aprofessional body changes and protects the profession before its too late. Forget waiting for pennies increase in GOS fees!
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Nicholas Rumney29 March 2025
It's more than a little disingenuous to blame the OFNC for "failing to negotiate" better fees when the fees are not, and never have been negotiated, but are imposed after a process of presenting what is wanted. The Department of Health of whatever its called is a wholly Trumpian institution.
The fault obviously lies as much within the the industry which does not present and undivided view, more a complete own goal. IF the industry wanted to do something to affect the process and maybe exert influence then practitioners and companies could take a leaf out of the Ontario Optometrists who refused to see patients under their NHS scheme until a more appropriate negotiation took place. Pigs might fly but they can't test eyes.
Alternatively, physician heal thyself. Private exam fees have by and large, as an average been worse at keeping pace with inflation, than GOS fees. So whose fault is that?
The fact is with open access to investment in instrumentation not part of the GOS contract , optometrists can charge additional fees on top of the GOS and cover cost and produce a significant return on investment, upwards of 5:1. We should also bear in mind that the GOS contract ceases after;
"(a) shows on examination signs of injury, disease or abnormality in the eye or elsewhere which may required medical treatment; or
(b) is not likely to attain a satisfactory standard of vision notwithstanding the application of corrective lenses"
anything beyond this for referral refinement or more precise diagnosis is chargeable.
Using the above two elements means that practices can offer extended examinations beyond GOS at much higher fees reflecting true cost and ROI although these cannot be compulsory and patients can decline. It's up to individual practice how they enact this.
Sitting on your thumbs or hiding behind a retail balance sheet whilst moaning about the OFNC and expecting the NHS to break the habit of umpteen generations is simply futile and self defeating.
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Anonymous28 March 2025
Time the OFNC was dissolved. They have effectively negotiated losses for the last number of years.
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Anonymous28 March 2025
With numerous Multiple and Independent practices offering free/cheap tests, "Glasses from £15" and so on, is this any real suprise?
If we as a profession don't value the services we provide, how can we expect an arms-length Government body to?
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CliveB28 March 2025
I am so glad I am coming to the end of my career as an Optometrist. Examination fees have been disgracefully underfunded for many years and the profession is being completely undervalued. Despite all the grand posturing from the AOP and the GOC about the importance of primary eyecare nothing is ever done to secure it. There is no way any optometry practice could exist purely on giving excellent professional care, without subsidising this from the sales of spectacles and contact lenses. This is effectively a form of "tax" on every air of spectacles and contacts that a caring professional sells. This tax is never imposed on uncaring profiteering companies who sell cheap spectacles on line etc as they don't have to fund the more expensive, and infinitely more important, clinical side. The GOS pays £23.53 for a service which costs more than double that, and yet will pay £42.40 (Voucher A) for a pair of spectacles that costs, even to me as an independent, about £3.50. No wonder the likes of Specasavers are not putting any real pressure the GOC to make this sensible.
Even without adjusting the fees upwards, maybe a better solution would to be incorporate the voucher A and the examination fee? ie a single fee of £65.93 which would include the examination and a pair of voucher A spectacles IF REQUIRED. All the higher vouchers could then be reduced to just the up grade value (ie voucher be would become £21.86 in addition to the intial £65.93 etc).
This would then revalue the cost, and value, of the eye examination as part of Primary Care Optometry. I am sure this would also see a massive reduction in the amount of "small -0.25 R&L etc" prescriptions regularly prescribed by certain companies. This, in my opinion is the only way to secure an effective and caring primary eyecare sector going into the future. If we don't I can see the rapid degression of our profession into two tier practices that employ just one Optometrist and a team of "refractionists"!
However, to do this we need negotiators, and a profession, that is willing and able to do what is necessary to acheive this.
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Anonymous28 March 2025
Wow. How toothless, ineffective and self-aggrandising are those who purport to negotiate on behalf of our profession and those using our services. Chocolate teapots.
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Anonymous12 April 2025
Yes, it is frustrating, but hardly the OFNCs fault when NHS England impose what they see fit regardless of negotiation. The biggest blame however lies with those professionals who sit by idly when the multiples they work for make them dish out cut-price "sight tests" in their ghost clinics.
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Anonymous27 March 2025
It's about time our governing professional bodies grew a pair and stood up for their members we are being walked over and abused by this government and the NHS .
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Mitchell27 March 2025
It's not just a freeze though because, as far as I can tell the threshold where folk on UC lose help remains frozen. So, as minimum wage increases more may fall foul of this, easy to miss, threshold. It is, in effect, a 3% cut and is unsustainable. Angrily of Bradford
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