As the government attempts to deflect concern about the Greensill affair onto the behaviour of civil servants, former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber commented this week that the real reason the Greensill scandal matters is because “Greensill is the privatisation of the NHS writ large: access to data and billing was the big prize and Greensill met everyone who mattered”, referring to the likes of health secretary Matt Hancock, NHS Improvement chair Dido Harding and NHS England boss Simon Stevens.
Greensill’s NHS product appears somewhat esoteric to the uninitiated – an app called 'Earnd', which allowed NHS employees to get paid immediately after a shift, rather than waiting for their monthly salary payment. The app was explicitly targeted at lower-paid NHS workers.
As Gabriel Pogrund, the Times journalist who broke the story has commented, it was David Cameron’s lobbying Hancock –including at a ‘private drink’ in 2019 – not chancellor Rishi Sunak, that actually bore fruit and led to a deal being signed.
