Hospital Trusts in some parts of England have more than doubled the income they receive from treating private patients following the coalition’s controversial lifting of a cap on such earnings, prompting concerns that cash is being chased as NHS waiting lists grow.

Across the country there appears to have been a 10% increase in private income since 2010, but some trusts appear to have radically rethought their attitude to seeking private patients.

The Royal Brompton and Harefield trust has increased its private patient income from £24.3m in 2010/11 to £33.6m in 2013/14. Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust increased its income from £13.3m in 2009/10 to £21.3m in this financial year.

Poole hospital NHS foundation trust has seen a 123% increase in its private patient income from £613,000 in 2009/10 to £1.5m in the past year.

The increase follows the controversial decision to allow hospitals to earn 49% of their income from treating private patients as part of the health and social care act in 2012. They were previously capped at earning about 2% from private sources.

On Friday, Labour MP Clive Efford will challenge Liberal Democrat MPs to back his private members bill to repeal the controversial act, which encourages a major injection of private provision of health care within the NHS.

In a sign of how toxic the alleged privatisation of the NHS has become it is understood that the Tory defector Mark Reckless, who is standing as a Ukip candidate in the Rochester and Strood by-election on Thursday, is planning to support the Efford bill.

On Thursday, Nigel Farage was forced to commit that Ukip would keep the NHS free at the point of use after he was caught on camera saying it should move towards an insurance-based system run by private companies.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said that financially stricken trusts were expanding their private patient units, even as waiting lists lengthen for NHS patients and treatments are rationed.

In Bournemouth, where private income has increased ten-fold, the number of patients waiting too long for operations has risen from 70 to 483 each month since the last general election.

Burnham said: “These figures show how the NHS is changing under David Cameron. Hospitals are now competing for private patients rather than bringing down NHS waiting lists. The public has never given their consent for the NHS to be changed in this way.

“No MP has got the permission of their constituents to let hospitals built with tax-payers money be used to treat private patients. They have the last chance, this Friday, to vote to stop it.”

Such is the financial pressure on trusts, the department of health has announced that an extra £300m will be made available to the NHS to ensure that the service is well prepared for the pressures of a cold winter.

Announcing the funding last week, health secretary Jeremy Hunt said the NHS was dealing with a million more visits to A&E each year compared to 2010, as well as an extra 2,000 ambulance journeys a day.

The trusts say that cash earned from private patients is reinvested into the NHS. A spokesman for the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS foundation trust said: “During the same period, NHS activity at the trust has increased by 25%; but this has been insufficiently funded under the current NHS tariff system, which is widely recognised as not recompensing highly complex work.

“The trust has subsidised the cost of growth in NHS demand through other income streams, including research and development and increased private patient activity. This income is redistributed across the services we provide for the benefit of all patients.

“It has enabled us to maintain the leading edge in the speciality we deliver so we can continue to treat patients with some of the most complex heart and lung conditions. Growth in private income has not been generated at the expense of denying, delaying or reducing NHS service, but in order to support it.”

A spokesman for the department for health said that the figures uncovered by Labour through freedom of information requests, to which 80% of trusts responded, did not give an accurate picture. He said: “These figures are completely misleading – while NHS hospitals have always been able to generate small amounts of additional income by treating private patients, the proportion has fallen slightly since 2010 and remains well below one per cent of hospitals’ total income in each of the last four years.”