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Tories exposed in the latest ‘conflict of interest’ register

Privateer Circle Healthcare is back, this time funding the wife of a health minister to send business to them — away from the NHS. What a strange coincidence, says SOLOMON HUGHES

ONE of the revelations in the recently released register of ministers’ interests is that a current health minister’s wife’s job is to get people out of the NHS and into private hospitals.

The latest register of ministers’ interests, which shows potential conflicts of interest in the government, took a year to appear. The register has attracted attention because of questions about whether it properly reflects Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife’s interest in his childcare funding plan.

Sunak has a scheme to expand childcare by offering a £1,200 bonus to people who register as childminders. But they only get the bonus if they register through one of six private childminder agencies.

His wife is a major shareholder of one of the six agencies, Koru Kids. Childminders who register directly with Ofsted only get a £600 bonus. Sunak wants to promote private agencies in place of Ofsted for administering childminders. It’s a boost to private firms, including one his wife partly owns.

That’s not the only eyebrow-raiser in the register. Neil O’Brien is a health minister, in charge of “primary care” — including GPs. In the register, he states that his wife is a “non-practising doctor and works for Circle Healthcare.”

Circle, a subsidiary of US private healthcare giant Centene, is one of the leading private hospital firms in Britain.

Why, you might think, does a private healthcare firm want “non-practising doctors” — why would they want a doctor who doesn’t do medicine?

Well, O’Brien’s wife Jemma is a “GP engagement lead” for Circle. That means she engages with GPs (the ones her husband is in charge of) for the private healthcare firm.

An advertisement for one of Circle’s “engagement staff” gives an idea of what this “engagement” means.

Circle’s GP engagement staff should be “delivering exceptional engagement to increase referrals, clinician engagement and associated revenue.”

Translation: they are there to redirect work from GPs to Circle instead of the local NHS hospital.

Now we can’t fully judge a wife by a husband or vice versa, but it is quite striking that when O’Brien asks his wife over the dinner table: “What did you do today, dear?” the answer is essentially: “I tried to redirect medical work away from the NHS into the private sector.”

Given how the government is running down the NHS, driving people to private hospitals, O’Brien could honestly respond: “So did I.”

Starmer admits to the Economist it will be ‘business before services’

WHAT is Keir Starmer going to do in government? It’s hard to pin down because Starmer spends a lot of time very specifically saying what he isn’t going to do, but only very generally saying what his programme actually is.

He isn’t going to nationalise energy or water, abolish student loans or increase taxes on the rich. Instead, he is going to complete a very broad “five missions.”

A recent interview with the Economist gave some more clues because the magazine asked very direct questions about policy, rather than the usual “vibes-based” interview.

Even under these direct questions, the answer is a bit blurry, because it is covered in a thick smog of management-speak. Asked for a “textbook definition” of what “Starmerism” is, Starmer says it is: “Building a better and changed Britain. And doing that by setting out in clear terms, what we’re going to deliver — they are the missions — but also how we’re going to do it.”

Elsewhere he bores on: “The missions are intended to give us the motors on the ships, and as a way to answer all questions. Are we going to do A or B?”

He is also all about the need to “break down the silos.” He gets a bit clearer on Labour’s big green investment pledge — and it is not good news.

Labour is pledging to raise an annual £28 billion in green investment. But, as Starmer (sort of) makes clear, this does not mean £28bn of public cash.

Green investment is only about “partnership,” which means: “Every pound that we put in, I want that to be triggering private investment of many times the amount that we’re putting in as part of the delivery on the mission.”

Green investment is one of his “missions” which “then has features to it. Partnership is one of those features. GB Energy is another. The money that we want to put behind this is a third.”

It seems the big promised public investment is a lot less than £28bn; as the expected private investment is “many times” more, the expected public investment must be “many times” less.

Because he is depending so heavily on business investment, it’s business that will get to decide where the investment is made.

Starmer says: “We’re going to have a core partnership with business. These are intense discussions we have with business, which is that we agree that we will deliver the missions together.

“For that reason I wanted a lot of business input into what the missions are, because I don’t think we’re going to get the partnership we need if businesses … don’t think that the missions are the right missions for the country. Then we partner as we go forward.”

So there will be a (subordinate) partnership with business on green investment.

Starmer also gave some worrying answers on the public sector generally.

The Economist asked: “Is Labour really capable of governing in lean times? And how do you transform public services without the major uplifts in funding that we saw in the Blair era?”

Starmer replied: “There is always the temptation with public services to think that if you put more money in the top, you necessarily get a better outcome.”

Instead, he signals that he will be about “change and reform,” not refunding.

Because Starmer won’t commit to extra taxes on the rich, the only extra money is entirely dependent on “growth” that “doesn’t involve huge change to the tax regime.”

The public sector is only going to get extra cash if the private sector delivers “growth,” which may well mean it isn’t going to get much extra cash at all.

Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter at @SolHughesWriter.

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