The Conservative health team is being funded by the wife of the chairman of one of Britain’s largest private hospital companies.
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, received £21,000 in November from Caroline Nash, wife of John Nash, the chairman of Care UK, according to official registers. Mrs Nash works with her husband running a charity to help the underprivileged young. The charity also sponsors an academy school in Pimlico, Central London.
Care UK runs a network of GP practices, NHS walk-in centres, out-of-hours services and NHS treatment centres. The company says that 96 per cent of its business, amounting to more than £400 million last year, came from the NHS.
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It would be well placed to benefit from a Conservative promise to make it easier for private providers to perform more NHS work. The Tory draft manifesto, released last week, says: “We will open up the NHS to include new independent and voluntary-sector providers — if they can deliver a service that patients want, to a high standard and within the NHS tariff, they should be allowed to do so.”
The donation came two months after Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, announced that existing publicly run services would be the “preferred provider” in the NHS, signalling that it would be harder for private healthcare to provide services. A re-elected Labour Government is likely to be less good news for the private healthcare industry.
Mrs Nash is a regular Tory donor, who together with her husband, has given a further £107,000 since 2006, most often contributing to the campaign to unseat the Labour MP in Hammersmith, Andrew Slaughter.
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Mr Nash, 60, last gave money in December 2006, according to the Electoral Commission. He was the founder, in 1988, of the private equity fund Sovereign Capital, which owns several healthcare companies, as well as the independent schools group Alpha Plus. The couple have not previously given to Mr Lansley’s office.
The Electoral Commission suggests the money came from Mr Nash himself but a Tory source said this was because Mrs Nash styles herself as “Mrs John Nash” and the entry dropped her form of address. A separate document published by Parliament, the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, confirms this. A spokesman for Mr Lansley said: “We have been completely transparent about this donation. It has been properly registered with the parliamentary register as well as with the Electoral Commission and is therefore fully within the rules. Mr Lansley did not solicit this donation. Donations from private individuals in no way influence policymaking decisions.”
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Mr Burnham is planning to write to David Cameron about the donation. A Labour source said: “How can the public trust Cameron on the NHS when his health secretary is hand in glove with a big beneficiary of Tory health policy?”