Rob Knott

Machiavellian spy firm or NHS saviour? The US giant that is ‘love-bombing’ Britain…..and the debate goes on….. @HCSAprocurement telegraph.co.uk/gift/0e95a2943…

Streeting's resignation letter

The Streeting legacy - Health Bill bang on 200 pages just dropped on Parliament publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill…

Streeting quits government ift.tt/v9RPWIj

Good for the Obsever for leading on this.

The NHS staff building FDP are heroes. The scare stories are dampening their progress and that has material impact on patient outcomes. My views in @Robert_Booth's article in the @guardian today. theguardian.com/technology/202…

Quote of the year. “Value doesn’t run April to April” @HCSAprocurement med-techinsights.com/2026/05/07/val…

Hi @SuellaBraverman , 48 hours ago I asked you to substantiate or withdraw your claim that “250,000 foreign students took £4bn in UK loans.” That time has now passed. You have provided no evidence, no clarification, and no correction. I have taken the time to examine the data myself. I have reviewed materials from the Student Loans Company, the Department for Education, the House of Commons Library, the UK Statistics Authority, and reporting from Times Higher Education. Across these sources, one thing is clear. Your statement is presented in a way that gives the public a deeply misleading impression. Let’s deal with this carefully. The £4bn figure you reference relates to the total value of student loans issued to non UK nationals. It is not a direct cost to the taxpayer. These are loans. They are repaid over time based on income. Presenting that figure as if it were money handed out or lost is not an accurate reflection of how the system works. Then there is your use of the phrase “foreign students.” This is where the distortion becomes more serious. The fact (which you know quite well) is those eligible for UK student finance are not newly arrived international students. They are people with settled status, indefinite leave to remain, refugee status, or long term lawful residence in the UK. They live here. They work here. They pay into the system. And under the law, they are entitled to access student finance. Standard international students on student visas are generally not eligible for these loans. By leaving out that distinction, you create a very different picture in the minds of the public. One where large numbers of people are arriving from abroad and immediately accessing public funds. That is not what the data shows. You also cited a figure of 250,000 without pointing to a clearly published dataset or transparent methodology. Numbers like this carry weight. They should be used with care, not as loose estimates in politically charged statements. I am not interested in party politics. But I am concerned about what this kind of messaging is doing to the country. When lending is presented as spending, and long term residents are presented as outsiders, it fuels resentment. It deepens division. It creates tension where clarity is needed. And ordinary people end up carrying the consequences of that confusion. Like I was being racially attacked and profiled in my initial response to you in X by supporters of your party who were obviously misled and triggered by your misinformation. I did consider legal action. But the reality is that the law is not designed to deal easily with this kind of broad public misrepresentation. You know that, which is why ignoring a challenge like mine carries little immediate consequence. That does not make it acceptable. I will be submitting a formal complaint to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards regarding your use of misleading statistical claims in public communication. The public deserves accuracy. Not selective framing. Not distortion. And certainly not narratives that risk turning people against each other on the basis of incomplete facts. Stephen Dada.

55% of the population of the London Borough of Brent was born outside the UK; the highest % in England*. In 2025, Brent Council spent: 💷£18m on Passenger Transport (Taxis). 198 of the payments were to Redacted Vendors 💷£9m on 650 blank payments with no ‘Vendor’ name at all 💷 £23m on 8,551 Redacted payments 💷£139m on 31,909 payments for Adult Social Care and Supplies 💷£45m on 3,622 payments for Rent 💷£25m on 14,601 payments for Prepaid Financial Services 💷£16m on Temporary and Agency Staff 💷£9m on HR, and £7m on HR- Training and Conferences 💷£4m to the Buckingham Hotel This is all according to their published payments, link below.

💷Taxpayer-funded taxis/transport in London; some examples: 'Wheel Get You There Limited' was paid £220k by Hounslow and £65k by Ealing. Its registered office is shown below. According to Companies House, there are 18 other active companies registered there.🧵1/5

HCSA Trustee Simon Walsh had the investiture for his British Empire Medal at Shire Hall, Lancaster Castle on Friday. He attended with his husband Stefan and niece Melanie. Simon retires at the end of June after 39 years service to NHS procurement. Congratulations again Simon!

@ZackPolanski - this is magnificent. Three things I can’t deny: 1. It is a video. 2. You are wearing a jacket. 3. Then you aren’t. 4. Then you are again. Unfortunately that’s where the accuracy ends. A few corrections for you: Peter Thiel is not our CEO. Alex Karp is — and has been for 20+ years. (A lifelong Democrat, for anyone keeping score.) We are not a “spyware company.” Spyware is malware. Malware is illegal. Calling a software company spyware is, technically, defamatory (don’t worry, we are not suing). We don’t build surveillance technology. We build software that helps organisations make sense of data they already hold. Not the same thing. There was no “private tour” of our HQ. There was a public photocall to which the media came. Hence, why there are so many pictures of the event. Our MOD contract is not “the biggest defence contract in UK history.” Ajax armoured vehicles = £5.5bn. Dreadnought submarines = £31bn. We’re grateful for the work, but let’s keep a sense of scale. We have no more access to NHS data than Microsoft has to the contents of your Word documents. I think you know this by now. We don’t have access to patient medical records. Same story. I agree that “nothing matters more than our health.” Which makes it worth reminding you of what Palantir’s software is actually doing in the NHS right now: ->110,000 additional operations ->15% fewer delayed hospital discharges ->7% more patients finding out within 28 days whether they have cancer Respect again for what you did with that jacket.

Government Procurement Strategy - debated in House of Lords on 22 April (along with latest reforms) @HCSAprocurement hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-0…

Overcharged barge bit.ly/4comVR6 not just the smugglers making money out of asylum seekers

Procurement should buy not just lowest-price, but assured-supply. Sourcing UK or allied manufacturing options, transparency of origin, and surge capacity. myemail.constantcontact.com/Prepared.html?…

Oh for the many years when the NHS Supply/Procurement Director position was in the top manaerial team

THE MAN THEY JAILED TO SAVE THE BANKS Tom Hayes (@robilypj) walked into the Serious Fraud Office thinking he was helping them. He gave 80 hours of interviews. Named names. Pointed upward. He thought he was a whistleblower. The @UKSFO had other plans. In 2015, Hayes became the first person ever jailed for LIBOR rigging. Fourteen years. Then eleven on appeal. The judge literally said he wanted to "send a signal." To whom? To the junior trader who did what his managers told him to do at UBS (@UBS) and Citigroup (@Citi) while the entire industry played the same game. Recordings later broadcast by the @BBC suggest the orders to manipulate LIBOR came from senior bank officials. Some fingers pointed toward the Bank of England itself. Nobody in a corner office was charged. Nobody in a corner office spent a single night in jail. Hayes served five and a half years. He was held in a segregation unit for his own protection. He developed serious mental health problems. He has Asperger's syndrome. He lost his marriage. He lost years with his son. On 23 July 2025, the UK Supreme Court unanimously quashed his conviction. The jury had been misdirected. The trial was unfair. The conviction was unsafe. Ten years after he was locked up, five and a half years after he got out, the law finally admitted it got it wrong. He has now sued UBS for $400 million, accusing the bank of making him the perfect fall guy while UBS paid $1.5 billion in regulatory fines and walked away. The complaint says UBS stage-managed the narrative to protect senior executives. The Serious Fraud Office, which investigated, prosecuted, and failed Tom Hayes for a decade, will not be seeking a retrial. Of course it won't. MPs including David Davis are now calling for a public inquiry into what one group of parliamentarians described as collusion between banks and government. SFO itself has been criticised for the conflict of interest in acting as both investigator and prosecutor. Its own expert witness performance during the trials was described by the Court of Appeal as an embarrassing debacle. LIBOR set the interest rate on roughly 300 trillion dollars worth of financial products. Mortgages. Student loans. Credit cards. The banks rigged it. Nineteen traders were convicted across Britain and the US. Not one senior executive faced trial. Tom Hayes went to prison so the system could look like it was doing something without actually doing anything. Source: @BBC / @Bloomberg / The Guardian / Many Others / UK Supreme Court judgment R v Hayes [2025] UKSC 29

@HeadofShopping @HCSAprocurement Lost for words. Double-whammy. They’ve not only downgraded the role, but they’ve moved reporting line from CFO to DCFO. The only thing that could possibly be even worse is to give the team a headcount reduction CIP. Oh, hold on a minute….

@Procure4Health @HCSAprocurement Absolutely, shameful

There might be a good reason for this decision - I can’t see it - but why oh why has MFT downgraded its Director of Procurement from VSM to Band 9, when its current Director has established one of the most mature/advanced teams in the NHS @HCSAprocurement jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/joba…

The UK government must publish a detailed impact assessment of the costs and benefits of the US-UK medicines partnership, by @sallygainsbury and James Lomax bmj.com/content/393/bm…

Who sits on the ‘Distilled Post Editorial Team’? distilledpost.com/post/breaking-…