Government sells entire NHS patient data to firm headed by disgraced banker

(not satire – it’s the UK today!)

I’m not sure what would normally constitute a political scandal of massive proportions – but surely this should be a contender.

Turns out the coalition government has secretly sold the entire NHS patient data for England to a private firm headed by a disgraced former Barclays banker.

The sale only came to light after the firm – PA Consulting Group – boasted about the fact buried deep in one of its documents.

Here’s the relevant section from the document called Future of Healthcare:

The Guardian has an article today asking questions about how a private company could manage to buy supposedly personal data of NHS patients:

NHS England patient data uploaded to Google servers

But what the Guardian article doesn’t mention is that PA Consulting is a management consultancy company chaired by a former banker - Marcus Agius.

Before he joined PA Consulting, Agius had to resign from Barclays along with Bob Diamond after the Libor scandal.

So the government hasn’t just sold off our private personal data to a private firm without telling us – turns out they’ve sold it to a disgraced banker.

Time was, this information would have constituted a scandal massive enough to bring about top level resignations, perhaps even bring down the government itself.

No more it seems.

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