The Conservative party’s chief executive has taken on a senior role at a private cancer care firm that said in its annual report it had benefited from soaring NHS waiting times. Stephen Massey was appointed CEO of the party in November 2022, months after he donated £25,000 of his personal wealth to support Rishi Sunak’s first, and unsuccessful, bid to become Tory leader. The financier, who has given the Conservatives £343,000, was made a director of GenesisCare in February this year.
It runs 14 diagnosis and treatment centres, and is a leading provider of private cancer care in the UK. GenesisCare’s most recent annual results , covering the year to June 2023, reveal revenues of £122m, up 20% on 2022 with operating profits totalling more than £7.5m.
In the report, company directors said they expected GenesisCare to be profitable for another year. They noted “positive revenue and profit momentum” for the year ending 2022 had continued, with “increased demand for private healthcare as a result of NHS backlogs post-Covid”. The national NHS target – under which at least 85% of people should start treatment within 62 days – was last met in December 2015, with the number of people facing long waits tripling over the last decade.
In 2023, about 75,000 cancer patients waited more than two months, the highest annual figure on record. NHS data from March shows only two-thirds of cancer patients in England received their first treatment within 62 days of an urgent G.
