BILLIONS MORE FOR OUR HOSPITALS NHS DRY
Bosses who make millions from contracts £60m riches of ‘sick tax’ car parking pair
ONE of the biggest players in the PFI market is Innisfree, a small finance company whose chief executive David Metter netted £9.1million in dividends last year.
The 65-year-old has a £5million mansion in London’s Little Venice district and is also reported to own a family home in France.
According to the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, Innisfree is one of just eight companies which own or have stakes in 92 per cent of all companies with NHS PFI contracts.
This means there is very little competition between the companies bidding for the work.
Another of the eight is John Laing, which reported a profit of £127.5m for 2017. Chief executive is Frenchman Oliver Brousse, who ran the first postprivatisation train company to be sacked by the Government for poor performance. He earned £1.6m last year. Other companies include Guernsey- based HICL, which made a £176.8m profit in 2016/17 and Aberdeen Asset Management, whose September 2016 accounts show a statutory profit before tax of £221.9m.
The highest paid directors at Aberdeen were chief executive Martin Gilbert, who took home £2.8m, and Hugh Young, who netted £2.6m. TWO fatcats behind one of Britain’s biggest hospital parking firms are now worth a combined £60million.
Ian Langdon and Ellis Green run CP Plus, which manages around 40 car parks for 20 hospital trusts.
More than £147million was spent on hospital parking in England last year and charities, unions and MPs from all sides have blasted the fees as a “tax on the sick”.
Fresh accounts for London-based CP Plus show its parent company made £3.7million last year and is now valued at more than £28million.
Mr Langdon, 64, is worth £32million and is selling a townhouse in St John’s Wood, North London for £3.7million.
His partner Mr Green, 62, has £28million, including a £5million home with pool in nearby Hampstead and drives a Porsche which has the word RAT within its number plate.
The pair, who earned £6million each last year, also own a property investment firm worth more than £14million.
They launched CP Plus in 1991. Clients include the NHS, THE NHS is unable to protect patient data properly, a Commons committee says.
Its report found “serious concerns” over NHS Digital’s care for personal details, including patients’ addresses.
The Health and Social Care Committee called on the organisation to stop sharing data while a probe is held.
It comes after it examined a data-sharing arrangement with the Home Office and Department of Health, where patient data was used to trace immigration offenders.
PSouth West Trains, British Land, BP, Roadchef and Moto service stations.
The CP Plus car park at Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford charges £4 an hour – the most expensive NHS site in the country. The profits will fuel anger about private firms raking it in from the NHS. A third of trusts increased parking charges last year despite Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt previously admitting the fees were a “stealth tax on the vulnerable”.
In 2014, he introduced new guidelines urging trusts to offer free or reduced-cost spaces for cancer patients, the disabled, relatives and staff.
But the rules were not legally binding and many trusts chose to ignore them. Critics claim the Government has shied away from axing them because they earn up to £150million a year for the Health Service. A spokesman for the firm said: “CP Plus manages some 400 car parking sites across the UK, of which around 10 per cent are NHS hospital trust sites. “All parking charges and tariffs are strictly controlled and set by each individual NHS trust.” Committee chair Dr Sarah Wollaston said it raised doubt over NHS Digital’s ability to “robustly act for patients” over information requests.
She said: “Address data held for purposes of health and care should only be shared for law enforcement... in the case of serious crime.
“NHS Digital’s decision to routinely share [data] with the Home Office with a lower threshold is inappropriate.
“This calls into question NHS Digital’s ability to robustly act on behalf of patients in the event of other data-sharing requests.”