EveryDoctor has been interested in the links between politicians and the private healthcare sector for some time now.
It can be difficult to work out exactly how political influence is built, but it does concern us when we find that individuals and organisations linked to the private healthcare sector and ‘Big Pharma’ have provided donations or benefits to our politicians.
As part of our privatisation campaign, we continue to investigate what’s going on. Our latest project has involved extensive research into donations and benefits accepted by members of the new Labour cabinet since the start of 2023.
We want to extend this project to examine financial links between all MPs and the private healthcare sector. If you’re be able to support this work, please click below:
image courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/53838616506/
Labour came into power promising to clean up politics. During the election campaign, Keir Starmer said he would “return politics to public service” and bring an end to the Westminster lobbying scandals that marked the last Conservative government.
That promise now faces its first test after an election in which Labour relied heavily on the financial services industry and corporate lobbyists to fund its campaigning.
Our analysis reveals that Starmer’s cabinet received more than £500,000 in donations alone from lobbyists, hedge funds and private equity firms connected to the private healthcare sector since 2023.
We found that some cabinet members even took free staff directly from lobbying firms. Anneliese Dodds, now the minister of state for development, declared that she accepted a staff member from Weber Shandwick to support her work between September 2022 and March 2023, a donation in kind worth £55,800.
The global PR and lobbying firm has represented the pharmaceutical companies Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche. The latter, which is the fifth biggest drug company in the world, previously refused to offer drugs for the treatment of terminal cancer and neuromuscular conditions at prices set by the NHS drug watchdog NICE. The Swiss multinational declared operating profits of $4.1 billion (£3.1 billion) in 2023.
Roche…the fifth biggest drug company in the world, previously refused to offer drugs for the treatment of terminal cancer and neuromuscular conditions at prices set by the NHS drug watchdog NICE.
Weber Shandwick’s clients have also included Serco, which provides facility and cleaning services to 18 NHS hospitals. The outsourcing company was also one of the firms that managed the government’s Test and Trace programme, which MPs later said “failed on [its] main objectives”.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, also used the services of a campaign advisor provided by PR and lobbying firm FGS Global between February and June 2024 – a donation in kind worth £10,000.
FGS Global represents Optum Healthcare Solutions, a subsidiary of US private healthcare giant United Health and consulting firm Ernst and Young, which has been criticised for charging the NHS more than £2,000 a day for its consultants.
The lobbying firm’s former clients also include Accord Healthcare, a UK pharmaceutical company which was fined £155 million in 2021 for charging the NHS excessive and unfair prices for hydrocortisone tablets for almost 10 years, from 2008 to 2018. The Competitions and Market Authority also fined Accord an additional £66m for paying two would-be competitors to stay out of the market.
The health secretary Wes Streeting accepted a hospitality package worth £600 to the Glyndebourne opera from FGS Global in June 2023. Streeting has also received £2,100 from CJ Strategy whose director Craig Leviton is a partner of FGS Global.
Big pharma lobbyists
In total, four lobbying firms, including FGS Global and Weber Shandwick, which donated to cabinet members, had Big Pharma clients on their books.
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner declared that she received a £5,000 donation from political consulting and PR firm Sovereign Strategy in March for “campaigning activities”.
The company previously listed Swiss pharma company Novartis as one of its clients with the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, which requires consultant lobbyists to publicly declare their activities. In 2018, Novartis unsuccessfully sued the NHS to try and prevent it from replacing one of its drugs, used for treating a serious eye condition, with a cheaper alternative.
Both Reeves and cabinet office minister Pat McFadden have received £15,000 cash donations from Tim Allen, a former advisor to Tony Blair and founder of lobbying and PR firm Portland Communications.
The company represents numerous clients in the pharmaceutical industry, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which refused to offer the NHS a drug for treating cystic fibrosis in 2019 despite the health service offering £500m for it.
Big pharma has almost doubled its spending on the NHS since 2015, including on deals that may have boosted medicine sales. Healthcare experts have already raised fears that the health service’s reliance on drug companies could lead to conflicts of interest in cash-strapped hospital trusts.
Outsourcers and consultants
In one of her first acts as chancellor, Reeves wrote to ministers instructing them to cut spending on consultants. Streeting had, similarly, called the NHS’s dependence on temp staff “infuriating” and pledged to tackle the problem prior to the election. Yet despite their tough talk, both have taken donations from lobbyists representing consultancy firms and temp agencies.
Kevin Craig, the founder of lobbying and PR firm PLMR, donated £39,000 to Streeting for staffing costs this year and purchased a domain for Reeves’ website worth £1,934.
PLMR’s clients include recruitment agency Adecco which is one of a number of companies that provides temporary staff to the NHS. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK are paying a record £4.6bn for agency personnel and another £5.8bn for doctors and nurses on staff to do extra shifts.
TheCityUK, a group which represents the financial and professional services industry, paid for a £852 dinner for Reeves and her team during the Labour Party conference in 2023.
Members of the powerful City of London lobby group include consultancy firms PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte, which charged the NHS £3,000 for its consultants. Also among its members are private health insurance providers Aviva and AXA, whose CEOs have talked openly about the NHS crisis presenting an opportunity to expand their businesses.
In addition, Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the treasury, received a secondee from consultancy firm Baringa to support his work between November 2023 and July 2024 worth £34,356. Baringa has received contracts worth £6.7m from the Department of Health and Social Care since 2020, including a £2.3m contract for managing NHS Test & Trace during the pandemic.
Lastly, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) covered Peter Kyle and Wes Streeting’s costs for attending a conference in Brussels in 2023. Blair has previously called for the NHS to offer paid services for patients. A recent report from the former PM’s consultancy firm also recommended closing down local GPs and redirecting patients to AI chatbots.
Hedge funds and private equity
Behind some of the biggest donations to cabinet members are hedge fund bosses with multi-million pound investments in US private healthcare firms and private equity bosses extracting bumper profits from the UK’s in-crisis care sector.
The think tank Labour Together has provided donations-in-kind of staff or research services worth £300,000 to nine cabinet members since 2023 including Reeves and Rayner.
The think tank in turn declares its donors, the biggest of which have been Trevor Chinn, a senior advisor to a private equity firm, and Martin Taylor, who runs the hedge fund Crake Asset Management.
Taylor’s firm holds $39m (£30m) in shares in United Health, and $7m (£5.4m) in shares in Elevance Health, also one of the biggest US private health corporations, according to the latest filings published by the United States Securities And Exchange Commission. The hedge fund boss has also personally donated £20,000 to Shabana Mahmood in 2023.
Other donors from the financial sector include private equity boss David Menton, whose firm Synova invests in care homes in the UK. Menton donated £2,230 to Streeting in February. The health secretary has previously criticised the involvement of private equity firms in the care sector and pledged to strip those that fail inspections from receiving public sector contracts. There is no suggestion that Streeting was referring to Synova or of any wrongdoing on the part of the firm.
Two Labour peers with investments in Big Pharma and private healthcare have also donated to the chancellor.
Labour peer Bernard Donoughue who donated £10,000 to Rachel Reeves in January has declared that he holds shares in Novartis, despite its failed past attempts to sue the NHS. Reeves also received a £10,000 donation from Clive Hollick, a Labour peer who holds shares in HCA, one of the leading private healthcare providers in the UK.
Our research is based on donations declared by cabinet ministers on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests between 2023 and 28 May 2024, which are published regularly on the House of Commons website. The declarations are brief and to understand who runs the companies donating to MPs and what they do takes additional research. We checked all donations provided by companies against records on Companies House to identify who their directors are. If the company is a lobbying firm, we checked to see which clients it has declared on the register of the Official Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists and the Public Affairs and Lobbying Register.
In the weeks since the election, Labour has given official jobs to a former donor and a consultant who was seconded to an MP prompting accusations of cronyism. The civil service appointments watchdog has now launched a review after it emerged that the two were hired without going through the normal civil service recruitment processes.
Labour’s record haul of donations over the past year and a half has no doubt helped it secure victory, but as our research shows it could prove to be a liability in power.
EveryDoctor would like to continue our project by examining the financial links between a wider group of MPs and the private healthcare sector. If you are able to offer a donation to support this, please click below.
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