THE latest accounts for Ramsay Healthcare UK show the private hospital firm was doing very well under the last year of the Tories. It is now spending a lot of time and money lobbying Labour MPs to try to make sure the shift from Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer means business as usual for private health.

Ramsay’s latest accounts, published this month, cover the year up to June 2024, so the last year of the Tories.

Ramsay UK is a subsidiary of an Australian private health firm. Ramsay UK has “a network of 41 facilities including hospitals” with more than 6,500 staff. Most importantly, Ramsay treats “private and self-insured patients as well as patients referred by the NHS.” 

This is the win-both-ways sweet spot that much of Britain’s private health industry aims for. When NHS waiting lists are too long, it gets money both from patients who can afford to skip the lists by going private, and from the NHS itself outsourcing operations to try cut those lists.

The 2024 accounts for its Australian parent company reveal its “UK acute hospital business reported a strong improvement in earnings” with “7.1 per cent growth in NHS admissions and a 5.3 per cent increase in private pay patients.”

Its strategy was certainly working under Sunak. Ramsay UK’s accounts show its turnover went up 13 per cent to £688 million in 2024. They made a £13.8m profit. Its highest-paid director — presumably chief executive Nick Costa — saw his pay shoot up 29 per cent to £682,000.

So will Ramsay continue to prosper from NHS outsourcing and private operations under Labour?

The firm says it will “place emphasis on nurturing first-class relationships” with “NHS commissioners and government,” adding it is focused on growing its business “as Britain looks for solutions to growing waiting lists.” NHS outsourcing is a top focus for Ramsay.

Ramsay pays money to be involved in a crude ruse for lobbying the new Labour MPs. It is involved in something called the Purpose Coalition, which looks like a sort of business-backed “social purpose” think tank, also known as This Is Purpose.

But the small print of the Purpose Coalition website reveals This is Purpose is really “the trading name of Crowne Associates.” Ramsay pays a lobbying company called Crowne Associates to make them part of the worthy-sounding — but corporate-run — Purpose Coalition.

Lord Walney leads the Purpose Coalition. He is better known as John Woodcock, a former Labour MP who told people to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 to stop Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson then gratefully put Woodcock in the House of Lords. The Labour Party has now moved so far to the right that Woodcock’s treachery and pro-Tory stand is forgiven.

Last year, Woodcock hosted a Purpose Coalition tent inside the Labour conference, where it held events for clients including Ramsay Healthcare and arms firm Leonardo. The Ramsay Healthcare event inside the Labour conference put Ramsay’s boss Costa on a platform with newly elected Labour MPs Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) and Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) to promote the private health firm.

The Purpose Coalition also helps Ramsay arrange visits to their hospitals by MPs. Ramsay says “these visits highlight the importance of direct engagement with policymakers” for Ramsay to promote “care provided to NHS patients as well as those opting for private treatments,” adding it was “a particularly important initiative considering the July 2024 general election and change in government.”

These promo visits to one of Britain’s biggest NHS outsourcers were especially appealing to newly elected Labour MPs. The 2024 intake was heavily vetted, so many new Labour MPs are very right-wing and pro-NHS privatisation. These new MPs also clearly want to feel “important,” so are suckers for Ramsay’s thinly disguised lobbying. According to their latest “impact report,” seven of the 11 MPs who were persuaded to come along to these PR-event Ramsay Hospital visits were Labour MPs — mostly newly elected ones.

They were Ballinger and Eccles (who also performed at the Labour conference Ramsay Event) along with other newly elected Labour MPs Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North), Paul Foster (South Ribble), Luke Charters (York), Sally Jameson (Doncaster), and veteran rightwinger and current chief whip Sir Alan Campbell (Tynemouth).

Even without back-bench Labour MPs visiting private hospitals in lobbyist-arranged PR stunts, Ramsay is likely to do well from further Labour NHS outsourcing. But every little bit of support helps the private health lobby.

Jim O’Neill: Reeves puts the bankers in charge

LABOUR is in charge of many appointments to government positions, which they could use to reshape the state by giving top jobs to union leaders, left-wing academics or socially conscious charity campaigners. Only it seems Labour prefer sticking to the old Tory model.

In the latest example of Labour’s “Establishment” appointments, Rachel Reeves made a banker, Jim O’Neill, the “second permanent secretary” in the Treasury. Even if she was determined to turn to the private sector, Reeves could have tried to break with “Treasury brain” by recruiting someone from manufacturing, but instead has turned again to the finance sector.

US-born O’Neill currently works for Bank of America, running their European corporate and investment banking operation. The Treasury said O’Neill “will help the government to secure private investment” — so Reeves has hired a banker so we can hand over more public investment to other bankers.

The Treasury also emphasised O’Neill’s previous stint at “public service.” O’Neill worked for UK Financial Investments (UKFI) for three years up to 2013. UKFI managed banks that the government was forced to nationalise in the 2008 financial crash. However, there was shock when O’Neill got UKFI’s top job; as the Daily Mail pointed out in 2012, when O’Neill was promoted to UKFI’s chief executive, this meant “an investment banker who played a pivotal role in the catastrophic deal that brought Royal Bank of Scotland to its knees has been named as the head of UKFI.”

O’Neill had worked at US bank Merrill Lynch and was “part of an elite team of Merrill’s bankers who advised RBS and its chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin” on a “disastrous” over-expansion of RBS, which made a major contribution to the bank’s 2008 collapse and the wider financial crisis.

It was this collapse which forced the government, via UKFI, to nationalise RBS. So Reeves’s latest appointment means one of the bankers behind the RBS collapse is now second-in-command at the Treasury.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.