How mobile Milburn made millions cashing in on health contacts

ONE man who doesn’t fit the pattern of social immobility described by Alan Milburn at the weekend is Alan Milburn.

Having been raised by a single mother on a County Durham council estate and comprehensiveeducated, he has gone on to make millions of pounds thanks to the revolving door from Westminster into private consultancy work, and his ability to exploit the expertise and contacts he built up as health secretary.

Confident to the point of swaggering, Milburn was one of the first Labour ministers to acknowledge a role for the private sector in the NHS.

But then he walked away from the chance to reform the Health Service, quitting in 2003 and saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.

Within a year or two of his exit, however, some began to wonder if Milburn was spending as much time with his family as he was with his money.

Eight months after quitting the Cabinet in 2003, he had a £30,000 annual consultancy with the venture capitalist group Bridgepoint. Three months later it was announced that Alliance Medical, a company partly owned by Bridgepoint, would provide scanning services to the NHS.

The multi-million-pound contract was announced by the Labour health minister John Hutton, who just happened to have shared a flat with Milburn for the previous ten years. In 2004, albeit briefly, Milburn was brought back to the Cabinet as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with the role of general election co-ordinator.

The grand title masked a more familiar task: Trying to curb Gordon Brown’s influence over the campaign.

He failed. Brown, who loathed Milburn, simply ignored him. After the election, Milburn returned to the backbenches and his flourishing commercial career.

When Blair quit as leader in 2007, Milburn resisted calls to challenge Brown for the top job. After all, there were richer pickings to be had.

In 2006, only months after leaving the Cabinet for the second time, he set up AM Strategy with his long-term partner and now wife, Dr Ruth Briel, a consultant psychiatrist.

By the time he left Parliament in 2010, Milburn was earning £115,000 a year from his connections to five private health sector companies, in addition to his £67,000 MP’s salary.

A peerage would have been virtually automatic, but if Milburn had accepted one it would perhaps have shone an unwelcome light on his income, since peers have to declare their outside interests. Milburn, 59, is clearly no fan of transparency when it comes to his own finances. His AM Strategy firm exploits company law to use ‘abbreviated’ accounts, which mean the firm does not have to show income from sales or fees to directors.

In the last financial year, AM Strategy had assets in the bank of £4.3million, a 167 per cent increase in four years. Milburn, his wife, and two sons Daniel, 20, and Joe, 25, are sole shareholders of the company.

He is on the board of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and chairs a board set up to expand the accountancy firm’s business interests in public and private health industries.

He also served on the strategic advisory board for private healthcare company Welldoc, as well as Lloyds Pharmacy, and advised a company developing a smartphone app for diabetes patients.

Other positions included a non-executive directorship at a Swedish private healthcare firm specialising in renal care.

He is chairman of the advisory board of the Bridgepoint group, giving the company his wisdom on its investments, including in

‘Became a bearded street agitator’

Care UK, a firm whose portfolio includes hospitals, GP surgeries and mental health centres, as well as more than £100million in Nhs contracts since 2013.

Today, his London home is a £1million flat in a fashionable development in south London, and there is also a detached house in a picturesque North east village with a stream running at the bottom of the garden.

milburn, who favours smart suits and designer glasses, topped by that distinctive mane of thick hair, is always personable, and quick with a soundbite for the media.

All of which is a far cry from his modest early upbringing. After leaving school, having gained a second- class history degree at Lancaster University, he went on to become a bearded street agitator and noisy salesman of marxist literature working in Newcastle upon Tyne’s political bookshop Days of hope, which acquired the waspish nickname ‘haze of Dope’.

he also studied for a PhD at Newcastle University, but did not complete his thesis. In 1981, he married future Labour meP mo O’Toole, but the couple split up in the late 1980s.

having been elected in Darlington in 1992, his first government job was as a junior health minister, in a field which has now made his fortune.

While milburn complains today about lack of progress in social mobility, he has always made sure that his tenure as social mobility tsar has not prevented his own march up the financial ladder.