Consultants should not be allowed to undertake private practice unless they can show that none of their NHS patients are waiting more than three months for hospital treatment, the health select committee heard this week.

Professor John Yates, director of Birmingham University's inter-authority comparisons and consultancy, said private practice should also be outlawed for consultants whose NHS outpatients waited more than four weeks, or who failed to achieve minimum workload standards.

He said there was evidence that consultants' private work created longer waiting times for NHS patients, and that existing restrictions on private practice in the current consultant contract had in many cases been relaxed or ignored. But Professor Yates told the inquiry on consultants' contracts that he had 'little faith' that the government would make such radical changes, despite its rhetoric promising 'tough decisions' on solutions to NHS problems.

He said that despite assurance a decade ago that job plans for consultants would allow the NHS to better regulate their private work, job plans were often not monitored or enforced, and had made 'little difference to the inequity that exists as far as patients are concerned'. Although the contract required consultants to spend at least 90 per cent of their time in the NHS, there was evidence that up to 40 per cent of time was spent on private patients; a figure which accounted for 50 per cent of consultants' income.

Professor Yates said one option would be to pay consultants purely to carry out NHS work. Improved NHS finances gave ministers an opportunity to increase consultants' pay, which was 'unreasonably low'.

The other option was to improve equity of access for NHS patients by preventing those consultants with long NHS waiting lists from doing private work in NHS hospitals.