Frank Hester has got rich running one of the companies most critical to the UK’s health infrastructure, but most people will never have heard of him or his firm.
By Hester’s own estimation, the Phoenix Partnership (TPP) – the software company he built from scratch and solely owns – is worth £1bn after winning more than £400m of NHS and prison contracts in the last eight years.
To celebrate reaching this milestone in 2019, he threw a “unicorn party” at his mansion near Leeds, complete with horses dressed up with horns, and his staff were invited to celebrate.
A computer programmer from West Yorkshire’s biggest city, Hester is included on the Sunday Times rich list with an estimated wealth of £415m. Former employees tell of big perks and a partying lifestyle for staff, driven by Hester. He would provide a free bar at the local pub on Fridays, and staff would be invited to week-long sailing trips, paid for by the company.
A larger-than-life personality, Hester would often socialise with staff and participate in company-wide WhatsApp groups and meetings, on occasion casually throwing around bad language.
Former staff describe him as a formidable and blunt presence in the office, with some saying they were at pains to address him in the right way on the phone and pick up to him within two rings, as well as following the firm’s “no bullshitting” ethos in their interactions with him at the time.
The businessman got the idea for TPP along with a university friend and set about building the software for the company in about 2005. He has previously described being frustrated seeing his now ex-wife, a GP, struggling with patient software and wanting to create a better product.
His software, SystmOne, was born, and gradually throughout the 2000s and 2010s it became one of the two incumbent players in the market, supplying about 2,700 GP surgeries in England with a way of accessing digital medical records on their computers.
The medical records are held on a server at an unknown location, with TPP storing them securely and making them available across the NHS, according to its website.
It has been a highly profitable service. Hester’s main operating company, the Phoenix Partnership (Leeds), recorded a turnover of £80m with profit before tax of £40m in the year to March 2023, Companies House documents show.
It paid a salary of £510,000 to Hester, its sole director. Over a period of five years from 2019 to 2023, the ultimate parent company, TPP Group, paid out £33.5m in dividends, which appear to have gone to Hester as its only shareholder.
As sole director and shareholder of TPP, Hester does not have a board or other shareholders to report to.
In public life, Hester has had a relatively low profile for someone who runs a business of such critical importance. He said in an interview with the Telegraph this month that he spent much of his life voting for the Green party or spoiling his ballot, but under the current Conservative government he has been part of trade missions led by senior Tory figures.
He was made an OBE in 2015 for services to healthcare, and joined David Cameron and Ken Clarke on trade trips. He met Boris Johnson at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in South Africa in 2020.
TPP has in an official capacity met government figures three times since July 2021, including Steve Barclay, the former health secretary, according to government filings.
Hester has spoken in favour of AI – the company says it is developing an AI model designed to predict the likelihood of patients failing to attend appointments – and he has also publicly lobbied the NHS to stop spending money on expensive IT systems, writing an open letter saying: “We are here for our NHS. We are here to help. Not to drive profits for shareholders, or to grease revolving doors. Let’s do it for the frontline and choose to digitise in an entirely different way.”
Last year, Hester made a surprise £5m gift to the Conservatives, putting him in the limelight. He set out his motivations at the time, saying he was donating to Rishi Sunak’s party because he believed it could deliver for the NHS.
“As a businessman from Yorkshire I have been fortunate enough to have met the prime minister. He shares my passion for harnessing the data revolution to transform the way we as citizens access healthcare,” he wrote.
To accompany the announcement this month of the second £5m donation, from his company, Hester rejected the idea that he was giving money in order to secure more government contracts, saying many came from hospitals and GPs. “GPs decide which software they’re using, not Rishi Sunak,” he said.
