The NHS must surely share Richard Branson’s pain | Letters

Richard Branson reveals how an incredibly kind man was conned out of $2m which could have gone to the people of the British Virgin Islands (Report, 18 October). Here in Wirral we share Branson’s pain. Every year our incredibly kind clinical commissioning group gives £2m to a private partnership. It’s money which could have gone to the people’s NHS. The partnership comprises 20 GPs. And a 21st partner, a company owned by someone living in the BVI.

What a coincidence. Peninsula Health, including partner Virgin Care, won’t reveal how much surplus the contract generates and how any surplus is divided among the partners. But we do know that recently a wonderful community walk-in health centre in the borough was closed at short notice and without consultation.

The address for Virgin Care services in Wirral also houses a walk-in centre. Wirral and the BVI may not share the same levels of devastation and tax avoidance, but in both places money which could be spent on people’s real needs is not being spent on those needs. To quote the great entrepreneur, it “sounds like it has come straight out of a John le Carré book or James Bond film, but it is sadly all true”.
Kevin Donovan
Birkenhead, Wirral

• Polly Toynbee (With all eyes on Brussels, our health service is collapsing, 17 October) notes her shock that Baroness Dido Harding, the former chief executive of TalkTalk, has been appointed as the head of NHS Improvement. Toynbee also comments that Harding was an Oxford contemporary of David Cameron.

Well, here’s another one for the collection, who was also a contemporary of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson at Oxford: Camilla Cavendish, who as a Times journalist repeatedly wrote about her concerns that social workers misused their powers, and misled family courts, to get children removed from families.

In 2015 she became Cameron’s policy adviser. When he resigned as prime minister she was made Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice. It is of some surprise that such a critic of social workers has just been appointed as the chair of Frontline, the company preferred and funded by the government to train the future generation of children’s social workers and social work leaders.
Dr Ray Jones
Emeritus professor of social work, Kingston University and St George’s, University of London

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