NHS England’s Board – Should Private Interests be running Our NHS?

Camilla Cavendish

Cavendish, a journalist and former No. 10 policy unit head under David Cameron, was appointed as a non-executive member of the board of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for 3 years from 13 January 2025.

As a journalist, Cavendish has frequently advocated for greater involvement of the private sector in the NHS. In 2007, she claimed that there are “diminishing returns to spending in a monolithic health service” in a column for the Times.

Instead of increasing funding for the NHS, the government should focus on introducing more competition by outsourcing more services to private providers, she argued.

Cavendish goes on to bemoan that, “Ministers are too easily persuaded that the battle is between public and private provision. They are ashamed to endorse the private.”

She has previously advocated for ministers to “outsource failing hospitals to other providers”, citing Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, which was briefly run by private healthcare firm Circle, as a model to be emulated.

Circle quit its contract to run Hinchingbrooke in 2015 after the Care Quality Commission recommended the Trust should be placed into special measures. An inspection had revealed that staff were so unresponsive to call bells that patients soiled themselves and that children were sometimes cared for by staff not qualified to treat them.

Prior to being appointed to the DHSC board, Cavendish worked as an advisor for InHealth Ventures, a venture capital fund for health tech startups. In September, she wrote that “technology will be central to productivity” improvements in the NHS in a column published by the Financial Times. 

Phil Jordan

Jordan was appointed to the board in January to “focus on data and digital capability at DHSC”. A former chief IT executive at Sainsbury’s, Telefonica and Vodafone UK, he appears to have no prior experience in the health sector.

Penny Dash

Dash became chair of NHS England in March, after having previously chaired the NHS North West London Integrated Care Board since 2021. Prior to chairing the ICB board, she spent nearly 20 years at the consultancy firm McKinsey, where she was a senior partner and led their healthcare work, according to her Linkedin profile.

When McKinsey was previously tasked with advising the government on healthcare reform it proposed slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs, clamping down on doctors’ tea breaks and reducing certain surgeries, like knee replacements, which it deemed unnecessary.

The consulting firm also reportedly drew up a plan to privatise several NHS hospitals in 2010, which was never ultimately implemented by the government due to fears of a political backlash.

In a 2011 speech, Dash praised private healthcare giants UnitedHealth and Virgin for taking over GP surgeries claiming that they are “delivering a much better quality service”. The latter pulled out of running surgeries in the UK later that same year. Dash also advocated the outsourcing of more services to private providers saying that there is “a real need to try and encourage more entrants into the market”.

Alan Milburn

Milburn, a former New Labour health secretary, was appointed by Wes Streeting to the Department of Health board in 2024.

Since leaving office almost two decades ago, Milburn has pursued a lucrative career in the private healthcare sector, earning more than £8m in dividends from his consultancy firm since 2016, according to a report published by the Democracy for Sale website.

He has also held a string of advisory roles at companies with private healthcare interests including Bridgepoint Capital, which owns Care UK, a large operator of care homes, as well as Ribera Salud, the Spanish subsidiary of US private healthcare giant Centene.

Milburn was one the leading architects of private finance initiative (PFI) deals that saw hospitals built on onerous contracts with private consortia that almost all are still paying off today.

In 2021, Milburn appeared on Newsnight calling for more NHS “partnerships with the private sector”. The BBC was forced to later apologise after it failed to mention his work for private healthcare clients.

Mark Bailie

Bailie, a former chief executive at Royal Bank of Scotland, joined the NHS England board as a non-executive director in 2024. He continues to work as the CEO of the insurance comparison website Compare the Market, which offers quotes for private healthcare insurance. He has also declared shareholdings managed by an external investment fund in two of the biggest US private healthcare companies, HCA Healthcare and UnitedHealth.

Mike Coupe

The former Sainsbury boss, famous for having been caught on a hot mic singing the musical number ‘We’re in the Money’ before an interview, was appointed a non-executive director on the NHS England board in 2021. Coupe previously served as testing director at NHS Test and Trace during the pandemic, which MPs later criticised for having “failed on [its] main objectives”.

Axel Heitmueller

Heitmueller, who was appointed as Keir Starmer’s health advisor in June, previously led Imperial College Health Partners, a team of researchers supporting the NHS.

He also worked as a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Change where he produced a report in 2023 advocating for the NHS to introduce a paid tier of services.

The report explicitly called for “active encouragement of new providers”, particularly private ones, to deliver high-volume, low-complexity services, such as dermatology or physiotherapy.

It also suggested turning the NHS app into a “digital marketplace” through which private providers can directly interact with patients and give them the option of effectively paying to jump the waiting list.

In 2022, Heitmueller dismissed an Oxford University study published in The Lancet which showed that private care is associated with more death and worse outcomes. He tweeted at the time in response to a news article about the study:

“Correlation is not causation – as @nedwards_1 and @sib313 have pointed out, there [sic] issues with the analysis which make any firm conclusion questionable. If we paid as much attention to avoidable deaths within the NHS as we obsess with private providers, lives could be saved,”