Software firm belonging to Tory donor Frank Hester pays out £50m dividend
The software company belonging to the Tory donor Frank Hester, a major contractor to the NHS, has paid a £50m dividend after sales and profits surged.TPP Group, which was founded by Hester in 1997 as The Phoenix Partnership, specialises in healthcare technology and provides its SystmOne software to the NHS.The company says it is used by 7,800 NHS organisations, including more than 2,600 GP practices and a third of acute mental health trusts, with 61m electronic health records stored in its database.It has also expanded abroad, including to China, the Middle East and the Caribbean.The company, which is owned by Hester and based in Leeds, had a turnover of £97.
1m in the year to 31 March 2025, up 13% on the previous year.It made pre-tax profits of £47.4m, up sharply from £17.4m, according to the latest annual accounts filed with Companies House.TPP paid a dividend of £50m in the most recent year, up from £7m in 2024 and £10m in 2023.
Hester stepped down as a director of TPP in September but remains the majority owner with 75% or more of the shares.The company paid him a salary of £520,000 in the year to March 2025, the same as in the previous year.The filings, which were first reported by the Times, also show the company donated £10.2m to the Conservative party in the year to 31 March 2024.Hester and his company have made donations of more than £20m to the Tories since the start of 2023, the Electoral Commission’s register shows.
The Phoenix Partnership donated a total of £15.3m, while Hester made a £5m donation in the second quarter of 2023.He was at the centre of a political storm in March 2024 after the Guardian revealed he told colleagues at his healthcare company in 2019 that looking at Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, made you “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”.Abbott said it was “frightening” to hear of the remarks.After the remarks were published, TPP issued a statement saying Hester accepted “that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.
The statement said he abhorred racism, “not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970s”.As a key supplier to the NHS, TPP has received £591m from public contracts since 2016, according to invoicing data compiled by Tussell, which tracks UK public sector spending.This includes £281.7m from the Department of Health and Social Care, £56.1m from NHS England, £17.
2m from Central and North West London NHS foundation trust, and the rest from NHS trusts across the country.Hester worked in the financial sector as a computer programmer for several years before starting the company.Running the NHS contractor has helped the 59-year-old amass a personal fortune worth £415m, according to the 2024 Sunday Times rich list, and earned him an OBE for services to healthcare in 2015.The TPP website states Hester wanted to remove the administrative burden from his now former wife, a family doctor, so she could focus on delivering care for her patients.By his own estimates, the company was worth £1bn in 2019 and he threw a “unicorn party” at his mansion near Leeds to celebrate reaching this milestone, complete with horses dressed up with horns.
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