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 GP referral.
Prof Pat Price, an oncologist and co-founder of the Catch Up With Cancer campaign, said the data was “a timely reminder that the cancer crisis continues and dangerous delays have been normalised”. Massey was appointed to GenesisCare, which has its headquarters in Australia, following a restructure focused on stopping bankruptcies in the US. GenesisCare is partly owned by the Chinese state-owned China Resources group. Last December, Massey was reported to have told a CCHQ staff call that he had been taking advice from sister parties across the world about how to recover from a massive defeat. It left a number of Tory insiders feeling as though he had given up on their election hopes. Overall NHS waiting lists have climbed to an estimated 7.57 million treatments at the end of April, affecting 6.33 million patients, according to NHS England figures released on Thursday. This is up from 7.54 million treatments and 6.29 million patients at the end of March. GenesisCare and the Conservative party have been contacted for comment.