What became of the £40million of NHS cash funnelled through this suburban home in woke scheme to give 700 Pakistani doctors work experience in the UK? GUY ADAMS investigates... | Retrui News | Retrui
What became of the £40million of NHS cash funnelled through this suburban home in woke scheme to give 700 Pakistani doctors work experience in the UK? GUY ADAMS investigates...
SOURCE:Daily Mail
Since 2001 the property has been the home of Helen Bradin, 65, a former solicitor who specialised in divorce and personal injury cases and is now a prominent figure in the local Rotary Club.
On a quiet residential street in the West Midlands is a red-brick house with a spotless front garden and a potted ornamental tree sitting on its expansive paved driveway.
Since 2001 the property has been the home of Helen Bradin, 65, a former solicitor who specialised in divorce and personal injury cases and is now a prominent figure in the local Rotary Club.
Worth around £750,000, it looks like something out of Keeping Up Appearances, the sitcom filmed a half hour’s drive away. Yet in this corner of suburbia, appearances can be deceptive.
This impeccable Birmingham address doubles up as the headquarters of a mysterious company named Scholar and Trainee Services Ltd, founded in 2017 by one Brigadier Saeed Akhtar, 76, an ex-military gentleman who lives in Pakistan.
However, the firm has for the past seven years been owned and run by Mrs Bradin, who is now its sole director.
On official documents, it is described as an ‘employment agency’.
From the two-page ‘micro company’ accounts that Scholar and Trainee Services filed at Companies House last April, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it does very much at all. Mrs Bradin lists assets of a mere £4,203, down from £5,153 the previous year, and claims to have just two employees.
Yet this anodyne paperwork tells only part of the story. For on Friday, Mrs Bradin and her tiny company were thrown to the centre of an extraordinary financial scandal.
A home on a quiet residential street in Birmingham doubles as the headquarters of a mysterious company named 'Scholar and Trainee Services Ltd' - founded by an ex-military gentleman who lives in Pakistan
It revolves around University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust [UHB], one of the biggest such organisations in England, which runs four hospitals, employs 26,000 members of staff, treats 2.2million people annually and each year chews through some £2.7billion of your and my cash.
Since 2017, no less than £40.5million of that public money has been paid to Scholar and Trainee Services under a little-known arrangement that saw Mrs Bradin’s firm help roughly 700 trainee doctors from Pakistan relocate to Britain to work in UHB’s hospitals.
The initiative was part of a woke scheme, nicknamed ‘learn and return’, via which the NHS agreed to allow junior medics from the developing world to learn valuable professional skills that they could then take back to their home nations.
In return, the British health service, which would pay these ‘International Training Fellows’ significantly less than junior doctors, would supposedly benefit from two years of their relatively cheap labour.
That was the idea, at least. But on Friday, UHB announced that it had abruptly terminated the £40.5million scheme after a review uncovered astonishing shortcomings in the way its affairs were run.
The review, carried out by blue-chip accounting giant KPMG, was completed in July and promptly hushed up. It has become public only thanks to a Freedom of Information Request filed by the British Medical Journal, whose coverage reveals at best epic incompetence and mismanagement, and at worst potential corruption, at the heart of the NHS.
The auditors uncovered no fewer than 17 serious issues which they said presented ‘several financial and reputational risks’ to UHB.
Several revolved directly around Scholar and Trainee Services Ltd, which appears to have been hired at the behest of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan [CPSP], a medical training body based in Karachi.
Helen Bradin, 65, (pictured) specialised in divorce and personal injury and is now a prominent figure in the local Rotary club. But on Friday she was thrown into the centre of an extraordinary financial scandal
Under the arrangement, the trust agreed to pay Mrs Bradin’s firm £3,960 per month [£47,520 a year] for each of the 700-odd ‘International Training Fellows’ that the CPSP sent to work in Birmingham.
The trainees would then receive their salary from ‘Scholar and Trainee Services’.
Yet the amount they were being paid appears to have been significantly less than the amount Mrs Bradin’s firm was getting, raising fears that the foreign workers were being exploited. And no one is entirely sure where all the leftover money ended up.
According to KPMG, both Mrs Bradin and the CPSP have refused to say how much cash the Pakistani doctors actually got.
What’s more, despite the NHS board funnelling a total of £40.5million to the company – which, remember, was based at a residential address in Birmingham – it appears to have had no formal contract or agreement with the business whatsoever.
So rudimentary was UHB’s financial stewardship that it doesn’t even seem to have asked Scholar and Trainee Services to submit invoices before shovelling tens of millions of taxpayers’ pounds into its coffers.
According to the KPMG report, it’s unclear whether any of the International Training Fellows on its books were paying income tax, a situation which it regards as being ‘unlikely’ to be legal.
It gets worse. For before inviting the Pakistani medics to travel to the UK and care for British patients, UHB failed to carry out basic pre-employment screening – including criminal record checks.
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust [UHB], one of the biggest such organisations in England, which runs four hospitals, employs 26,000 members of staff, treats 2.2million people annually and each year chews through some £2.7billion of your and my cash
The trust’s training and education agreement with them is also likely to have broken employment law, since they were not informed about their basic rights, including holidays and sick pay.
One employee who became pregnant while working at the trust had her employment terminated, an experience she quite understandably described as ‘traumatic’.
Elsewhere, the scheme also saw hundreds of thousands of pounds of British taxpayers’ cash spent flying NHS staff to Pakistan on so-called ‘exchange visits’.
Although a Memorandum of Understanding between UHB and the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan supposedly stipulated that the CPSP would pay for such trips, KPMG found that the bills were instead picked up by the NHS trust.
It shelled out a total of £122,564.50 including £9,000 on hotels.
Though they were ostensibly working trips, the visits – which often involved members of UHB staff who boasted Pakistani heritage – seem to have been quite the gravy train.
The BMJ report states: ‘Auditors were told how it was common for these trips to last as long as two weeks, during which Trust staff would be provided with food and accommodation.
However, KPMG found that this hospitality was not declared under the trust’s conflict of interest policies and was not consistently recorded.’
Since 2017, no less than £40.5million of that public money has been paid to Scholar and Trainee Services under a little-known arrangement that saw Mrs Bradin’s firm help roughly 700 trainee doctors from Pakistan relocate to Britain to work in UHB’s hospitals
There are concerns that recruitment to the International Training Fellow programme, which was run almost entirely by the CPSP, was open to widespread corruption, with the report stating there were complaints from applicants in Pakistan that candidates had been shortlisted based on ‘personal references and favouritism’.
Perhaps most scandalously of all, the scheme, which – remember – was supposedly designed so that Pakistani doctors could ‘learn and return’ back home, appears to have instead been used by the majority of the ‘fellows’ to gain permanent residency in the UK.
KPMG interviewed 80 doctors who completed the programme. They found 68 per cent had not returned to Pakistan, and were now living and working in Britain.
This, the BMJ points out, is despite Pakistan being on the World Health Organisation’s recruitment ‘red list,’ meaning British employers should not be recruiting doctors from there so as not to denude the local health service.
It all adds up to one of the most extraordinary and costly scandals in NHS history.
And while UHB has said that it will scrap the scheme, and permanently cut ties with the CPSP, dozens of other, perhaps similar, programmes remain in operation.
Nearly 7,000 foreign doctors took part in such ‘fellowships’ between 2009 and 2023, and several other English trusts run versions linked to the Pakistani college.
Partha Kar, a former Royal College of Physicians councillor who has called for an end to the exploitation of international medical graduates, told the BMJ the KPMG report points to wider systemic problems.
‘Birmingham is probably the tip of the iceberg,’ he said. ‘It shows trusts have been so desperate to fill workforce gaps, they have taken their eye off the governance. All schemes should be paused until we are clear where we are.’
With grim predictability, it seems unlikely that any of the NHS managers who presided over the shambles will be held to account.
UHB NHS Trust says that ‘a number of actions need to be taken which are complex and will take time to work through’ but will not say where whether any staff would face disciplinary action.
Meanwhile Kiran Patel, UHB chief medical officer, who ordered KPMG’s review after taking the job in 2024, was keen to state there was ‘no suggestion or findings of impropriety or fraud by any trust employee’.
As for Mrs Bradin, she was not at home when the Mail visited on Friday, but emailed last night to insist – somewhat bizarrely – that the KPMG report had ‘found no issues related to Scholar and Trainee Services Limited’.
It remains unclear how and why the company was hired in the first place. Or what the role of the mysterious Pakistani brigadier Saeed Akhtar was in its affairs.
For now, the fate of the £40.5million of public money funnelled through this corner of suburbia remains shrouded in mystery.