The NHS is still spending more than £55,000 per year on homeopathic remedies – despite doctors being told to stop prescribing them.

Last night health officials said they would be asking the Government to “blacklist” such drugs, so that NHS funds could never again be spent on them.

In 2017, NHS England issued guidance instructing doctors not to hand out prescriptions for homeopathic treatments, which chief executive Simon Stevens described as “at best a placebo” and “a misuse of scarce NHS funds”.

But newly-released data shows doctors handed out nearly 3,300 prescriptions for “homeopathic preparations” last year, costing the NHS a total of £55,044.

Prof David Colquhoun, emeritus professor of pharmacology at University College London, said the number of prescriptions being made out, in apparent defiance of the current guidelines, was “extraordinarily high”.

NHS England’s guidance, issued in November 2017 as part of a drive to save £141 million a year, aimed to phase out prescriptions for 18 treatments deemed to be of “low clinical effectiveness”, including homeopathy.