Diane Langford and Julie Wassmer say they became concerned when they saw Dame Ruth Carnall, a former NHS executive who heads the private consultancy, Carnall Farrar, had been made Independent Chair of the Programme Board of the local Sustainability & Transformation Plan (STP) – one of 44 regional bodies put in place by NHS England to implement cuts and “savings” within the NHS.(1)

Author and campaigner, Julie Wassmer says “I raised concerns with former Canterbury MP, Julian Brazier, at a public (CHEK) meeting last March, questioning how Dame Ruth could possibly claim ‘independence’ when her own company was set to profit from the contract. At the same time, I was aware that my colleague, Diane Langford, had already been coming up against a wall of obfuscation in trying to discover how much that contract was worth and who was actually making the payments.”

Ms Langford, a writer and former Hansard transcriber says: “I actually submitted my first Freedom of Information request in December 2016, then dozens more to all eight Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in Kent and Medway as well as to Kent County Council (KCC) and NHS England in order to try to establish who was paying Carnall Farrar. As each respondent has up to 20 days to reply, it was an extremely time-consuming process and all the bodies denied having paid the firm though KCC had disclosed that the money came from ‘the NHS.’”

A complaint to the FOI Ombudsman against Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust was triggered when no reply was received within 20 days.

Eventually the campaigners found that millions of NHS money had been paid to Carnall Farrar by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, of which Glenn Douglas was then CEO. Wassmer then obtained a meeting last month, at which the campaigners discussed with Douglas (now – CEO of the Kent and Medway Sustainability and Transformation Partnership) and Michael Ridgwell (its Programme Director) the huge sums that had been paid to Carnall Farrar and why they were not appearing on the Trust’s usual spending records for payments of £25k and over.

“Ironically,’ says Wassmer, “this was on 7th December, just before the local NHS was about to implode with the pressure of Christmas and New Year emergencies. Michael Ridgwell was unable to produce an exact figure of how much had been paid to Carnall Farrar, but suggested the sum of £2.2M. I then explained that with the help of research organisation, Spinwatch,(2) we had actually confirmed that a figure of £6,051,199 had been paid to September 2017 (3) – though only just over half of it had been logged in the Trust’s spending records, with no record of any significant spending on Carnall Farrar before June 2017 – and no trace of the remaining millions. At the meeting Glenn Douglas explained to us that as the STP is not an “organisation” it is not obliged to publish its payments, but Michael Ridgwell then agreed to publish the full expenditure on the Trust’s website and has since done so. These records show that Carnall Farrar has been paid well over half a million pounds a month since September last year, although it’s not known whether this money is on top of the £6m it has already charged the local NHS.“

The campaigners insist it is crucial to challenge the lack of clarity, transparency, and accountability surrounding such huge payments. Even more so as the government now seeks to introduce new bodies – Accountable Care Organisations – that could see billions of pounds of the NHS budget handed to commercial companies.

“This is public money,” says Wassmer, “NHS funds being diverted away from services and into the pockets of private consultancies. We know that over £6 million, and possibly more, has been paid from the local NHS budget to this one consultancy for barely 18 months’ work on the local STP. How much more is going to management consultants across the whole of the UK? It’s almost impossible to hold the system to account and I fear it will only be worse with the impending introduction of so-called Accountable Care Organisations (4). Paying millions to private companies, like Carnall Farrar to find damaging cuts within an underfunded service is not only senseless – it’s immoral.”

Diane Langford agrees: “This lack of transparency conceals not only the sums involved, but the role consultancies like Carnall Farrar play in axing services. At our meeting on 7th December, we mentioned that Dame Ruth Carnall had appeared in a 2011 list compiled by the Sunday Telegraph of the highest paid NHS “fat cats” – earning an annual salary of over £200,000 at that time.(5) Glenn Douglas was on the same list, and while he admitted he was still earning in excess of £200,000 a year, the point is that as an NHS member of staff he can be held duly accountable for his work, in a way that private companies like Carnall Farrar cannot.”