Dear readers — this is the third instalment of our investigation into TPP, Leeds’ biggest tech company that handles millions of NHS health records. In our first article we revealed that several coroners had raised serious concerns over TPP’s software, with one prison GP describing it as “an absolute nightmare”. In our second article, we looked at the case of Jade Revell, who died aged 30 after worrying findings on her blood test results weren’t clearly flagged by TPP’s software, SystmOne. The company's clinical adviser, Dr Matt Curtis, denied to us that there were any problems - but at the time the company did acknowledge an issue.
Since then, we’ve been speaking to people who worked for TPP to get a picture of what was going on inside the company. That’s today’s story.
"I'm going to sack Dale".
On a Friday night in February 2019, a group of TPP software developers were in the pub near the company’s Horsforth headquarters. It was one of the perks: end of week pints, with the company picking up the tab.
As always, TPP’s founder, owner and chief executive Frank Hester was there. He noticed that one of the developers, Dale Haddrick, had not spoken to him. He thought this was strange, and went over.
Haddrick had been at TPP for four years. His salary had doubled in that time, to £60,000. An employment tribunal would later describe him as “a valued and trusted employee”.
According to the tribunal’s account of that night, Haddrick told Hester that TPP “did not use new technologies (unit testing) or make good technical decisions”. (Unit testing is a standard way of checking automatically that each piece of a program does what it is supposed to do by feeding it examples with a known right answer and checking it gets them right.) Recollections from this point on varied. Hester believed Haddrick said that the founder was “able to control people”. Haddrick said the word he had used was “charismatic”.
On Saturday, Hester reported the conversation to his managing director, Charlotte Knowles. The following week the two of them met Haddrick twice. They wanted him, the tribunal heard, to be “open and honest”. They accused him of not being so.
At 11.21pm that Sunday, Hester sent Knowles a text. “I’m going to sack Dale,” it said. “fine by me asleep,” she replied.
Haddrick was suspended two days later. The letter said he had “raised that you believe Frank Hester CEO blocks the use of new technologies and is manipulative towards his employees”. A month after that he was dismissed, on the grounds that trust and confidence had broken down.
He took TPP to a tribunal and lost. The judge accepted that the decision had been made independently, by a member of staff with HR responsibilities. Knowles told the tribunal she had not taken the text to mean Haddrick would be sacked, arguing that Hester “could not sack him”, as only HR officers decided who was hired and fired. TPP said it had checked and found that “we do use modern technologies”.
A former TPP developer told The Exchange what happened when the company won a tribunal case during his time there. “They gathered all of the developers into one room and they told us that they won the case,” he said. “They were almost cheering about it.”
Whilst tribunals are rare, staff being dismissed by TPP is not. In fact, one former staffer estimated to us that 90% of all employees at TPP were fired.
On the forums of reddit, Glassdoor and other social media platforms, employees describe a workplace where people were dismissed without warning, where the chief executive’s behaviour went unchallenged, and where suggesting a different way of building the software was a risk to your job.
The Exchange has spoken to former staff and to a senior NHS doctor who took a safety concern to TPP, and has read more than 130 reviews of the company written by its own employees since 2017 to understand: just what is going on inside the company that manages millions of healthcare records?
Hi, I'm Daniel, editor at The Exchange. We've set this up to do in-depth reporting on all things going on in Leeds.
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