NHS-linked donor bankrolled two health secretaries
Yvette Cooper is the second health secretary in a row funded by a recruitment financier with commercial ties to the NHS.
NHS doctors cannot accept a free pen from a drug company without triggering a conflict-of-interest rule. The health secretary who sets their pay and their department’s contracts has taken almost £500,000 from a donor whose firms profit from NHS recruitment, a health secretary NHS donor link that a BMJ analysis, reported by Novara Media on 11 August, has put on the record three weeks into Yvette Cooper’s time at the Department of Health.
Cooper is the second health secretary in a row funded by the same man. The register of MPs’ financial interests shows she received £248,619 personally from medical-recruitment entrepreneur Peter Hearn, and a further £220,623 from his companies MPM Connect and OPD Group, over the past decade. A spokesperson for Cooper said the money “kindly donated” by Hearn funded her office staff, was “fully declared” and “compliant with all the rules.” Nobody disputes that. The declaration is not the question doctors’ groups are asking.
The question is what Hearn’s firms actually do. He held a significant stake, via holding company Berwick Partners, in Odgers Berndtson, a recruitment firm that has worked extensively with the NHS. It was Odgers Berndtson that headhunted Dido Harding to run NHS Test and Trace during Covid-19, a scheme that spent roughly £25.7bn of a £37bn budget by June 2022 and which former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson called “the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time.” That is what “commercial ties to the NHS” cashes out as when the money reaches the top of the department.
Hearn is not a new face in Labour circles. He funded Cooper’s 2015 leadership bid and Dan Jarvis’s attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn the same year, and MPM Connect is now reported to be the third-biggest company donor to individual MPs since the last election, spreading roughly £340,000 across Streeting, Jarvis and Cooper combined.
NHS chief’s private health donor names the health secretary Because before Cooper, there was Wes Streeting. He took more than £285,000 from Hearn and his companies between 2019 and 2026, part of over £372,000 he received in total from private-health-linked donors, around 60% of everything he declared. Campaigners including Doctors’ Association UK demanded in February that Streeting release his messages with those donors. He resigned as health secretary in May, amid the Labour leadership crisis that ended Keir Starmer’s premiership; Andy Burnham moved him to Defence and put Cooper in his old job in July. The donor stayed put. Only the minister changed.
“NHS doctors are prohibited from accepting small gifts from pharmaceutical companies, such as a pen or a notepad, because of the risk of the perception of influence,” said Steve Taylor of Doctors’ Association UK. “Ministers responsible for the NHS should be held to at least the same standard.” Emily Ball, a GP and director at EveryDoctor, put it plainer: donations from firms with commercial ties to the NHS “inevitably raise questions about whose interests are being served.”
Hearn has since died, so this specific relationship ends with him. EveryDoctor’s own analysis found Labour MPs received almost five times as much from private-healthcare-linked donors as every other party combined, £2.7m in total, meaning the pattern he leaves behind does not. Nobody has broken a rule. A doctor still cannot take a pen.
