Good Law Project

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has paid £137m in hidden payments to a firm owned by Frank Hester, the healthcare tech tycoon. Hester, who was found to have given a £5m donation to the Conservatives earlier this month, has received around £800,000 a week to his company, Phoenix Partnership. 

The enormous scale of the payments to Hester’s Phoenix Partnership has not previously been reported.

Good Law Project calculated the size of these payments by combing through four years of the department’s data on official payments.

The contracts under which the payments were made have not been published on the Government’s official procurement website, Contracts Finder, but the DHSC claims the payments were made under a published ‘contract framework’ and that there is no requirement to publish individual contract awards.

The accounts of the holding company, which is 100% owned by Frank Hester, reveal that he was paid £10m in dividends last year. In December last year Frank Hester wrote: “We are here for our NHS. We are here to help, not drive profits for shareholders or to grease revolving doors.”

The VIP lane – a system for fast-track access declared illegal in a Court case brought by Good Law Project – saw many controversial contracts given to Conservative donors, without competition.

“We’ve been shining a light on the donors’ money-go-round since the pandemic,” said the Good Law Project Executive Director, Jo Maugham, “but the huge size of Hester’s donation makes this stand out for its sheer ugliness.”

Frank Hester was approached for a comment.