Big pharma giant Pfizer rounded off 2016 being fined £84.2 million after screwing the NHS and the taxpayer by hiking up the price of anti-epilepsy drugs by over 2,000 percent – bummer. It’s times like these you need a little help from your friends, and Pfizer can count on the help of some well paid and well connected chums. In September, the lobbying firm that represents Pfizer hired none other than the former top aide to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Sue Beeby, now of Lexington Communications, was Jeremy Hunt’s Special Adviser (or “SpAd”) at the Department of Health from 2012 to 2015. Beeby has a long service record with top Tories: she also worked as Hunt’s SpAd when he was Culture Secretary from 2010 to 2012, and was a Tory press officer for four years before that. In 2015 she spent a year as one of Chancellor George Osborne’s SpADs.
According to a “Transparency Release” from the Treasury made on the 16th of December, Sue Beeby became an “Associate Director” of lobbying firm Lexington Communications in September.
Lexington represents a host of big drug firms, including Pfizer. This December financial regulators fined Pfizer a record £84.2 million for an unjustified “Drug price hike to the NHS”. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said that by changing the branding on their anti-epilepsy drug, Pfizer were able to get around rules to stop them profiteering. After “deliberately de-branding” the drug, prices of the drug went up “by up to 2,600 percent overnight”.
The CMA’s Philip Marsden said Pfizer and their partner “deliberately exploited the opportunity offered by de-branding to hike up the price for a drug which is relied upon by many thousands of patients. These extraordinary price rises have cost the NHS and the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds.”
Pfizer say they want to appeal the ruling. Having the Health Secretary’s aide working for their lobbying company may well be useful to them in this process. Lexington advertise that they can help companies who are “seeking to input into policy or engage with government decision makers” or “navigate complex regulatory challenges”.
Lexington have not publicly announced Beeby’s new job yet, but they do list her as one of their staff on the lobbyists professional register, which is maintained by the Association of Professional Political Consultants. The Treasury’s Transparency Release says that it “approved” Beeby’s new job, but this is “subject to a six-month lobbying ban from start of role” – so officially Beeby cannot lobby the government directly until February. Beeby would have once had to go to the semi-independent – and stricter – Advisory Committee on Business Appointments to approve her new job, but the Tories watered down the rules so she only needs departmental approval.
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Beeby’s new employer, Lexington, also represents other major drug suppliers to the NHS, including Johnson and Johnson and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry, the trade body for all drug firms. It also counts Interserve – a major NHS privatisation specialist – among its clients.
Lexington is also advertising its services around Brexit, offering clients the help of a “dedicated Brexit team”. “Lexington can help business to understand the Brexit process and engage with the new machinery of government,” it says. The firm has some major banks among its clients, including Goldman Sachs and Lloyds Bank, which are virtually coming out in hives about Brexit.
Sue Beeby’s time working for George Osborne at the Treasury could come in handy. These banks may seek to influence the government over Brexit and preserve their special status in Europe. While at the Treasury, Beeby met with Lloyds officials.
She is now working for Lloyds lobbyists as that infamous revolving door between politics and corporations keeps on spinning. In France, this process is called “Pantouflage” – from the French word for “slippers”: former civil servants leave the government to put on the comfy slippers of corporate employment.
I reached out to Lexington, Beeby and Pfizer for comment, asking whether Beeby’s appointment is example of the “scandal” of corporate lobbying that the last government was so concerned about, with “ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way”. None of them got back to me.
Lexington Communications was founded in 1998 as an essentially Blairite lobbying company: its founder, Mike Craven, was a former Labour Party Chief Press Officer. It still has many former advisers to ex-Labour ministers, so getting a top Tory like Beeby into its clan is a coup for the company – get you a lobbying firm that can do both!
@SolHughesWriter
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