WES Streeting accepted over £50,000 from a firm with links to private healthcare recruitment weeks before axing thousands of NHS jobs.
The UK Health Secretary announced on February 26 that NHS England, which has overseen the administration of the health service across England since 2012, would be abolished.
The UK Government plans are expected to result in 9000 jobs lost including a huge swathe of the organisation’s senior team, with Streeting since saying even more jobs could also be lost by scrapping other health-related quangos amid wider fears over Labour’s plans to privatise the NHS.
READ MORE: Wes Streeting vows to 'go further' than Tony Blair to use private sector in NHS
But The National can now reveal that Streeting accepted a £53,000 donation from the OPD Group, which is listed as a company “controlled by” Peter Hearn, on February 3 – weeks before making the announcement.
Hearn is a recruitment executive whose firms work with “senior NHS executive recruitment and helps private healthcare providers recruit healthcare professionals”, according to EveryDoctor, a medic-led group which campaigns for a better NHS.
The mogul previously made his fortune through recruitment companies including Odgers Berndtson, which owns Berwick Partners – one of the leading private healthcare executive search consultancies in the UK.
He is still a director of various other holding companies, which are created to buy and own the shares of other companies, with ties to recruitment firms including Odgers Berndtson.
Streeting’s register of interests says the £53,000 donation from Hearn is going towards "staffing costs in my constituency office” to be paid in four installments throughout the year.
The donation comes despite Streeting claiming this week that recruiters were ripping-off the NHS, writing in The Times on Wednesday that the health service was “being fleeced” by agencies, with temporary staff costing the NHS £3bn a year.
It also isn’t the first time Hearn has funded a staffer for Streeting’s private office.
We previously reported on the Labour minister’s hefty donations from firms linked to private healthcare, with Streeting receiving a further £48,000 from the OPD Group on February 6 last year, also for staffing costs.
He also accepted a donation for staffing costs from the OPD Group of £12,000 on December 6, 2023, and another £35,475 donation from a second firm controlled by Hearn between February 28 and September 8, 2023.
They are all declared on his register of interests and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has also received £17,000 in funding for staffing costs from the OPD Group in March 2024, with the firm and Hearn one of the biggest donors to the Labour Party and Labour MPs in the past few years.
"It is shocking, but by this stage unsurprising, that Labour's Health Secretary appears to have allowed himself to be so intertwined and reliant on donations from the private healthcare industry,” an SNP spokesperson told The National.
“After all, Wes Streeting is the man who said before the election that the Labour Party would hold the door 'wide open' to the private sector when it came to the NHS - it appears that wide open door includes his own office.”
They added: "In a week where the Labour Party announced a new age of austerity, where they made the political choice to balance the books on the backs of the disabled, it is obvious that their promises of 'change' can never be trusted again. Austerity 2.0 won't protect our public services and Labour's choice to push people into poverty will hurt them and harm the NHS.
"This is a Labour Government in name only - every single day previous Labour voters are seeing that they have left behind any shred of the values they were originally founded to serve."
"Private health providers and vested interests already have far too loud a voice in the corridors of power. They are not handing over their money to MPs like Wes Streeting out of the goodness of their hearts, it is because they want to get something in return.
"There's a clear conflict at play. We need a thorough overhaul of any donation system that is allowing those who stand to profit from the privatisation of our services to bankroll the people in charge of decision making.
"With Labour's cuts and chaos already hurting people and services in Scotland, we will always stand up for our NHS and against the privatisation agenda being pushed by Downing Street."
A spokesperson for Streeting said: “All donations have been declared and published in accordance with the rules.”
OPD Group Ltd has no website and The National was unable to contact it for comment. Labour have been contacted to ask if they have a contact for the firm or Hearn.
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