Andy Burnham was the only Health Secretary ever to privatise a hospital, and he is heavily dependent on Alan Milburn, who with Tony Blair and Paul Corrigan brought the concept of NHS privatisation from fringe of the think tank circuit to the heart of government. Therefore, Maria Ward-Brennan writes:
Private equity firms are circling the UK’s healthcare market as NHS backlogs push a wave of patients towards private providers, experts have said. Britain’s biggest private hospital operator, Spire Healthcare, which operates 38 private hospitals, on Sunday agreed to a £1bn takeover by Toscafund Asset Management. Earlier this year, private healthcare property firm Assura agreed a tie-up with listed rival Primary Health Properties following a bidding war with private equity giants KKR and Stonepeak.
City lawyers said they expect investors’ appetite for private healthcare to continue in the UK with no immediate end in sight to the issues plaguing the NHS. “Private healthcare is a resilient market, and comprises a mix of private pay, insured patients and, in the case of Spire Healthcare, NHS work, so [they are] generally good payers,” said Tom Whelan, partner at law firm Reed Smith. An ageing UK population and the persistent issues facing the NHS were driving investment from private capital investors into the private healthcare market, he added.
Problems facing the NHS
Activity in the UK private health market has surged as a result of rising NHS waiting lists after the Covid pandemic. As of June, the total NHS waiting list in England stands at approximately 7.27m cases. The backlog in access to state healthcare has also had a knock-on effect on rising employee sickness, as almost two-thirds of employees find it difficult to book a doctor’s appointment. A spokesperson for the Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN), said: “Private healthcare providers are now delivering care to record numbers of both NHS and private patients, with IHPN’s latest Going Private research finding that four in ten people now expect to use private healthcare in the coming year, while almost half of 25–34-year-olds have already used it.”
Uptick in insurance policies
City businesses are also increasingly offering private healthcare insurance as an employee benefit when trying to recruit new staff, recruiters and insurers have told City AM, with younger generations in particular valuing a work-sponsored workaround. The IHPN spokesperson said the group has seen record numbers of policies being issued by employers to new staff, a trend it expects to continue. As health secretary, Wes Streeting said the government should use the private healthcare sector to help slash NHS waiting lists. Whelan said: “It’s hard to see how the NHS will be ‘fixed’ in the short term, which reinforces the resilience of the private healthcare model.” “[This] should also mean that the NHS will continue to lean on private healthcare providers to plug the gap in delivery of its own healthcare services as it strives to improve services and being down waiting times, adding further to private healthcare provider revenues,” he added.
The rise in patients, both those who can afford to pay for treatments and those who have insurance, is resulting in greater revenues and profits for private healthcare providers, making the businesses attractive to private equity. Spire Healthcare reported total group revenue of £1.5bn for the 2025 financial year, a 4.5 per cent increase from the previous year, with 43 per cent of its revenue coming from private medical insurance. For health-focused insurers, Vitality’s revenue passed the £1bn mark in its 2025 financial year after falling to a pre-tax loss of £168,000 in the prior year.
Lauren Almeida writes:
Britain’s biggest private hospital operator has agreed to a £1bn takeover by a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler” for his aggressive business tactics. Spire Healthcare, which owns the Claremont hospital in Sheffield and St Anthony’s hospital in south London, has agreed to a 250p a share offer by an investor group led by Toscafund Asset Management, which values the business at £1.03bn. Toscafund was founded in 2000 by Martin Hughes, a City investor nicknamed “the Rottweiler” for his vocal activist approach.
The takeover follows a lengthy period of negotiation between Spire and Toscafund, which was already the second biggest shareholder in the business. The company operates 38 private hospitals and more than 60 clinics across England, Wales and Scotland, which together provided care to 1.36 million patients in 2025. The deal comes despite concerns about the creeping privatisation of the health service. A study in April found that private companies providing services to the NHS, including healthcare and consultancy, have together made £1.6bn in profit over the past two years. Spire had previously been in talks with the private equity companies Bridgepoint and Triton, although they fell through when both pulled out in March.
Spire had announced a strategic review last September, telling investors that it was in discussions with several parties to explore a potential sale of the business. Hughes said in a statement that his fund “has a track record of backing successful healthcare businesses to grow and improve”. “As a private company, Spire would have the freedom to plan for the long term and the agility to move faster: investing in its hospitals and people, putting the latest technology to work and setting new standards in patient care,” he said.
Debbie White, Spire’s chair designate, said the company, squeezed by rising costs such as national insurance contributions and a higher minimum wage, had faced “much volatility” in its trajectory without a buyer. “As an experienced healthcare investor and the company’s second largest shareholder, Toscafund has deep knowledge and experience of the business and its operations, and Toscafund has assured the board of Spire that it is committed to providing the highest standards of care to patients,” she said. Shares in Spire, which is a member of London’s FTSE 250, rose by 3.2% in early trading on Monday to about 246p. The company’s biggest shareholder is Mediclinic, a private healthcare group founded in South Africa.
And Maddison Wheeldon writes:
Tory Kwasi Kwarteng has told Good Morning Britain (GMB) that private healthcare insurance will have to “play a part” in the future of the NHS. Kwarteng argued against using taxation to fund a service that “always needs more money just to stay still”. However, this has been the case since the NHS’s inception post-WWII. Funnily enough, decades after its founding, the Tories — aided by Kwarteng — have been chronically underfunding and under resourcing the NHS as official government policy, stripping its parts for the profits of the ultra-wealthy.
Privatisation is why it has grown more expensive with the taxpayer seeing less value for money — and now Kwarteng and his right-wing cronies want you to aid these profits further by giving up on a free healthcare service and paying for likely expensive insurance premiums. All the while, the UK has seen the rich get ever richer, whilst inequality widens. It won’t be the rich hurt by this policy — although they will fund the profits. But it will have very real and fatal consequences for ordinary people.
People need to wake up to the real enemy of the people
For months now, much of the threat of NHS privatisation has been laid at the feet of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has done little to conceal his enthusiasm for dismantling the NHS and opening it up to private profit. But the desire to dismantle and privatise our health service is not confined to any one political party. The Conservatives spent years expanding the role of private companies within the NHS following Labour introduction of PFIs under Blair — and Burnham. All the while, they introduced austerity measures to add insult to injury and compound the harm.
Labour has continued those policies that funnel public money towards private interests, taking lofty donations from private healthcare. Reform are simply determined to push that agenda even further and faster than its predecessors. No matter who holds power, the health of ordinary people remains under threat. The NHS belongs to all of us. It was built on the principle that healthcare should be provided according to need, not wealth – and generations of people have paid into that system with the expectation that it would be there when they needed it.
Turning healthcare into a vehicle for private profit means diverting public money away from patient care and towards greedy shareholders, executives and wealthy investors. In contrast, as so often happens in the class-war society we live in, it will be those without wealth and privilege who pay the highest price. When critical healthcare becomes a commodity, the people who cannot afford it are the ones left behind.
The rich are choking the NHS — and intend to cash in at the end
Once again, ordinary people are being sacrificed at the altar of profit. Those representing hard-working people in the NHS, informed by lived experience working in our healthcare services, have long called for quite the opposite — real solutions for the entire population and to finally say no to profiteers seeking to exploit our increasingly flailing health
It gets even more shady
Some of the super-rich are now openly contradicting their own supposed commitment to free-market principles. Lord Alan Sugar has attempted to argue that one of the world’s richest men should effectively become responsible for supplying the NHS, under the guise of creating a more “centralised” system. But centralisation does not automatically mean efficiency. After all, handing enormous purchasing power to Amazon risks creating precisely the kind of monopoly that free-market advocates supposedly oppose. We have seen the impacts of these monopolies in the privatised water industry — it only benefits the shareholders, not the consumers.
If the argument is genuinely about efficiency and saving taxpayers money, then competition should matter. NHS services should be able to compare suppliers, negotiate prices and choose the products that offer the best combination of cost and quality. Currently, they do not have that freedom. Otherwise, “centralisation” risks becoming little more than a convenient way of concentrating vast amounts of public money and purchasing power into fewer private hands. Likewise with private health insurance companies. It is difficult to square that with the supposed principles of the free market. However, the NHS is not breaking under its own weight — politicians and profiteers are deliberately piling that weight onto it. We can all see now that we cannot afford the greed of the richest in our society any longer.
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