A doctor takes on the NHS – and its Liverpool law firm

Dear readers — welcome to your midweek edition. Yes, you've already heard from us twice this week, not including Laurence's appeal — which did say we had an abundance of great stories to share with you.

Today's involves a well-known Liverpool law firm. In fact, it's Hill Dickinson: the very outfit that once advised the White Star Line after the sinking of the Titanic and now sponsors Everton's new stadium, and its dispute with whistleblower Chris Day. Accused of “unethical behaviour” in 2019, the long-running Liverpool institution is now involved in a protracted litigation and accusations of fraud — which Day says runs against the traditions of both the city and its football teams.

We'll let Tommy Greene unfold the story below. But first, your regularly scheduled Post briefing.

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Post briefing

Sefton's MP Bill Esterson has said the war on Iran proves the case for green energy. Since US and Israeli forces attacked the Middle Eastern country, reportedly causing over a thousand civilian deaths, oil prices have also risen by 27%. With Iran currently restricting access to the Strait of Hormuz, a vital trade artery, many experts expect this rise to continue. Esterson, Labour MP for Sefton Central, told the BBC it shows "that the energy transition [away from fossil fuels] is absolutely right." Energy secretary Ed Miliband has labelled the UK's dependence on fossil fuels was its "Achilles' heel", arguing green power is the only way to reduce people's energy bills.

Speaking of Red (or should that be Green?) Ed, one of his trademark schemes — the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology — continues to hit a snag on the Wirral peninsula. Hundreds of protesters against the controversial Peak Cluster project assembled outside the local council's extraordinary general meeting. Council leader Paula Basnett will now write to Miliband urging him to scrap the CCS scheme laying out cross-party objections. Earlier this week a government statement said there were no plans to pause the development of CCS projects. To read our investigation into CCS on Merseyside, click here.

And it's a bad week for one of Liverpool's least-favourite sons. Huyton-born ex-Manchester City footballer Joey Barton has lost a libel case to former England footballer and pundit Eni Aluko over social media posts. Barton, who once served a four-month suspended prison sentence plus 200 hours of community service for hospitalising teammate Ousmane Dabo, must pay Aluko £300,000 damages and legal costs. It's not the first time Barton, who last year was found guilty of assault after kicking his wife in the head, has been in hot water for social media posts: in 2024 he was sued by Jeremy Vine for calling the television host and cycling enthusiast a "bike nonce."

But that's not all: Barton, who was once sentenced to six months in jail after punching a man twenty times and attacking a teenage boy in Liverpool city centre, has also now been denied bail at Liverpool Magistrates' Court after being charged with an assault which a court heard could result in a man "losing sight in one eye." Barton, who once paid a Man City youth player £65,000 as part of an out-of-court settlement after allegedly stubbing out a lit cigar in that victim's eye, "vehemently" denies the latest charge.

by Tommy Greene

My phone pinged out a high-pitched alert, cutting through a busy and bright spring afternoon in 2019. The Freedom of Information response had finally landed in my inbox.

I’ll confess, there are probably more dramatic cold-opens in journalistic history than the simple arrival of an FOI response. But the documents attached to the email, ostensibly the kind of routine NHS commissioning contracts that even hospital administrators must find tedious, contained the very thing I’d spent the past year looking for.

For years, the NHS had argued that a medic who reported what he considered fatally risky understaffing in an intensive care unit had no legal protection from the consequences of his whistleblowing. It was an argument advanced by a law firm with serious heft: Liverpool’s Hill Dickinson, whose name now stares out over the Mersey in huge lettering from the front of Everton’s new £800 million stadium. But the documents I had uncovered directly contradicted their case: they showed that these whistleblowing protections did exist all along. Better still, the documents had been drafted by none other than Hill Dickinson.

To put it in the plainest possible terms, Liverpool’s most famous law firm had taken public money to draw up the contracts, only to then advise the NHS that the protections they outlined did not exist.

I forwarded the email to Chris Day, the tech-savvy and telegenic whistleblower, then in his early thirties, whose original complaint has now devolved into a twelve-year-long legal battle, derailing his medical career in the process. He could tell immediately that “this was all we ever needed to win the case.”  

Day says Hill Dickinson’s failure to disclose that its own lawyers had written the key NHS commissioning contracts I uncovered in 2019 amounts to an act of duplicity that now entitles him to compensation.

Hill Dickinson has made at least £13.2 million from NHS England and its affiliate, Health Education England (HEE), in legal fees during the years this David vs Goliath dispute has been running, according to the response to a parliamentary question from Tim Farron, a Liberal Democrat MP. Moreover, the firm recorded an operating profit of £68.2 million last year – and it is now reportedly targeting annual turnover of £200m. 

Hill Dickinson has been hailed as Liverpool’s great legal success story, drawing on an illustrious history that included advising the White Star Line after the sinking of the Titanic. Its branding of the Everton stadium is, at least for law firms, without precedent in the lucrative world of England’s top-flight elite professional football. Despite having opened offices in London, Monaco, Singapore and Hong Kong, the company has emphasised its “Liverpool roots”, in the words of CEO Craig Scott, and its ties to this community in the naming rights deal. A company press release described the stadium deal as “one of the largest…in Europe”.