Labour donor's private healthcare interests revealed

Martin Taylor's hedge fund has shares in a private healthcare giant – critics say Labour should not accept donations from those who “see the NHS as a financial asset”

By Paul Dobson, Karin Goodwin and Peter Geoghegan.

A top Labour donor who has given the party millions under Keir Starmer’s leadership runs a hedge fund with shares in a private healthcare giant – which critics claim is profiting from the NHS crisis.

Martin Taylor, who founded London-based Crake Asset Management, has given more than £5.5m to Labour, its politicians and a Labour think tank since April 2020, when Starmer won the party’s leadership contest. 

His donations include tens of thousands of pounds individually to both Starmer and deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner.

Taylor has also bankrolled Labour Together, the think tank credited with changing the face of the party following the departure of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Labour Together itself has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to individual Labour MPs.

Now quarterly US filings, released this month and now being reported by Democracy for Sale and the Ferret, reveal that Crake Asset Management has bought shares worth more than £8m in HCA Healthcare since July.

HCA Healthcare claims to be the largest private healthcare provider in the world and “one of the leading private healthcare providers in the UK”.

Critics of Taylor’s donations said Labour must make clear whether they are on the side of NHS patients or their donors, and that the party should not be accepting donations from those who “see the NHS as a financial asset instead of a social one”.

They claimed that despite politicians protestations to the contrary “big donations buy influence and access” and it was time for donations to be capped at £5,000 to stop anyone paying to “secure privileged access”. 

However a spokesman for Taylor, a lifelong Labour supporter, said that he was “keen to pay higher taxes in order to help fund the NHS” and insisted his political views had no influence on Crake’s investment decisions. HCA’s UK arm is a “microscopic part” of its global business, they added, and any “involvement HCA may have in the NHS is entirely irrelevant” to its share price.

HCA’s only Scottish clinic, in Glasgow, charges £90 for a 15-minute appointment with a private GP according to its website. Other services are available either through medical insurance or “self-pay”, where patients meet upfront costs in full, including health screenings, mental health services and physiotherapy.

Most of its other hospitals and clinics are in London, with surgery often costing thousands according to online reviews. There are two further clinics in Birmingham and Manchester. 

Last year The Ferret highlighted the company as one of several private firms criticised for its role in the midst of the UK-wide health crisis, which has left many people struggling to access GPs or on waiting lists for treatments.

The company has received criticism in the US, where it faced a class action earlier this year after being accused of “scheming to restrict competition” in order to drive up the cost of health plans. HCA has called the allegations “baseless” and said the suit will drive up hospitals’ “cost of doing business in the form of high litigation expenses”.

In the UK it was accused of “a raid” on the NHS last year after it was revealed to be spending tens of thousands of pounds in “golden hellos” aimed at recruiting NHS-trained doctors. HCA said the benefits given to those it recruited were “standard practice” across the healthcare sector.

Labour has insisted that it is committed to ensuring the NHS will “always be publicly owned and funded” and says it will end “two-tier healthcare” where the rich can pay for better services denied to the less affluent. But it urged the use of the private sector to help clear the backlog and also claimed that building “an NHS fit for the future” will require “fundamental reform”, which some fear could involve the use of private companies. 

Tom Brake, the former Liberal Democrat MP and director of campaign group Unlock Democracy, claimed that “voters worry that they are the last to be listened to” and that instead, “it’s big donors who have the ear of government”. 

“There is a simple way to reassure them,” he added. “Put a strict cap on company and individual donations. A cap of £5,000 per year would mean nobody could use money as a lever to secure privileged access."

Crake also has shares in Amazon, worth over £140m according to its most recent US filing. Amazon is facing a legal challenge from the GMB Union alleging that it has tried to coerce staff into cancelling their trade union membership. Amazon has denied the allegation. 

The asset management firm has a history of investments in the private healthcare industry. Crake previously had holdings in UnitedHealthcare, which reduced from £110m at the end of December 2023 to £10m at the end of June 2024 before being sold. Crake also sold its stake in another US healthcare giant, Elevance Health, over that period.

Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It, which campaigns for public services, claimed the NHS was being undermined by “dodgy” private companies “who are trying to worm their way in. “We don't want profit-driven companies like HCA Healthcare in our NHS, or lobbying our government behind closed doors,” she added.

“We call on [health secretary] Wes Streeting and the new government to stand up for Labour values and end outsourcing in our NHS as part of their 10-year plan. The money wasted on profits could build a new NHS operating theatre every week.

“Keir Starmer should not be accepting donations from people like Martin Taylor who see our NHS as a financial asset instead of a social one which gives us all peace of mind when we get ill."

Labour has faced questions over its proximity to the financial sector in recent months as part of a wider furore over its relationship with donors. 

Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary who has has been made a top advisor to Starmer on the NHS, was criticised earlier this year when Democracy for Sale revealed that he had received more than £8million from private consulting since leaving offices. Milburn’s clients include leading private healthcare providers.

The SNP MP Kirsty Blackman said Taylor’s donations “reek of the same old Westminster story”. 

“Sir Keir Starmer must come clean and provide full transparency on all of these donations because voters will rightly wonder what exactly these donors expected in return for their millions,” Blackman said. 

“The SNP has called for a full investigation into the Labour Party’s donations scandal and it appears inevitable that these stories will keep coming until that happens.”

A spokesman for Martin Taylor said: “Martin has supported the Labour Party and its values, including defending the NHS, all his life. [He] remains as keen now to pay higher taxes as he was in 2015 – when he publicly stated that those with higher means, such as himself, should pay higher taxes in order to help fund the NHS. This issue has become ever more important, because the health of the NHS has distressingly deteriorated even further over the past nine years due to chronic underfunding.”

He claimed the shares were bought due to the outlook for HCA’s US business, where it is the largest operator of hospitals across the country, with the UK business making up just 2.3 per cent of revenue and 0.2 per cent of profits. “It is therefore obviously wrong to suggest Crake bought HCA shares on either the basis of the outlook for its UK business or its involvement with the NHS,” he added. 

“His personal political views have no influence whatsoever on the investment decisions of Crake Asset Management or any other fund he has previously been involved with,” he added. (Taylor’s statement in full is here.)

Both the Labour Party and HCA Healthcare were approached for comment.