The following is nothing new but it sheds some light on comments I make elsewhere on this site. It’s a story about Alan Milburn (remember him?) and Alliance Medical.
Back in 2004 Mr Milburn resigned as  Secretary of State for Health “to spend more time with his family”. During this time he took on a £30,000 a year consultancy with the venture capital firm Bridgepoint Capital Ltd, part owners of Alliance Medical Ltd.

When he took up the job with Bridgepoint in March 2004 he was told by the advisory committee on business appointments  he could begin the job “forthwith but for one year after leaving office he could not be personally involved in lobbying any government ministers or officials”. As he left the DoH in June 2003 he was free to lobby from June 2004. On 29 June, Health Minister John Hutton announced that Alliance Medical had been awarded a £95 million five-year contract to provide and operate 12 mobile MRI scanners for the NHS carrying out 120,000 scans.
At the time the Allliance Medical contract was announced, Professor Adrian Dixon from the Royal College of Radiologists cautioned: “There are a lot of MRI systems in hospitals which have just been put in by the government which are not running to full capacity. We hope [the deal] will not interfere with proper funding of these machines.”

This deal broke a promise made by Labour in 1997.

“After the 1997 election Labour said its privatisation programme would only embrace ‘non-clinical’ parts of the NHS. The DTC scheme ends this promise…. I recall sitting in a fringe meeting at the 2000 Labour Conference, at which an angry radiographer asked Alan Milburn why scanning services, although clearly ‘clinical’, were being privatised. The former health secretary did not answer.”

(Solomon Hughes, Red Pepper magazine)

The contract itself was controversial. John Hutton told the House of Commons “Standard Government procurement processes were followed in which advertisements were placed and companies were invited to send in expressions of interest. Following a robust negotiation process, Alliance Medical was selected as the company that offered value for money and capacity to deliver services.”
However, using the Freedom of Information Act it was later found that “the original idea for the MRI scan contract had come not from the government but Alliance itself. The only difference between the deal that Alliance finally secured and what it had at first proposed is that the company had also wanted to provide endoscopies, and ultrasound and PET/CT scans.” (Solomon Hughes, Red Pepper magazine).

Sources
Unicorn (http://www.againstcorruption.org/BriefingsItem.asp?id=12433)
Source Watch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alan_Milburn)