Blueleaf was paid £35.9m on a £4m Covid contract. A FTSE 100 company has just bought it.

On 8 October 2026 Bunzl plc announced that it had bought Blueleaf Care, which it described as "a leading UK distributor of care and nursing home products", with revenue of £58m in 2025. It did not say what it paid. Frank van Zanten, Bunzl's chief executive, welcomed "a high-quality business that further strengthens our position in the UK care home market".

Blueleaf is a Plymouth Brethren connected business. We have been reporting on it for six years, because of what happened to it in 2020.

Two families, one brand

Blueleaf as a name is not old. It was created out of two Brethren care-supply businesses: NHG, the Andrews family's, and Clinicare Supplies, the Campbells'. The combination was announced in October 2017 and completed the following summer. The trade magazine The Care Home Environment reported it in July 2018, describing sixty years of combined experience between the two, and quoting Scott Andrews as commercial director and Nathan Campbell as corporate services director.

Nathan Campbell was still an officer of Blueleaf when Bunzl bought it, eight years later.

Four of the seven

In May 2020, with care homes unable to get protective equipment, the Department of Health and Social Care named the wholesalers it had arranged to supply them.

Two of those seven, Careshop and Delivernet, were already owned by Bunzl. Two others, Blueleaf and Nexon, merged with each other in July 2023. With this purchase, Bunzl owns four of the seven names on that list.

The seven were not picked out of the air. Two weeks earlier, every one of them had been in the same meeting.

The meeting on 12 May

The department's own transparency return for April to June 2020 records that Helen Whately, then Minister for Care, held a video roundtable on 12 May 2020, its purpose given as "Roundtable discussing adult social care PPE distribution". Eleven suppliers were in the room:

Department of Health and Social Care, ministers' meetings transparency return, April to June 2020. Organisation names as the department published them.

Three of the eleven were Brethren-owned: Blueleaf, Nexon Healthcare and Protoc Healthcare Products. Two more, Care Shop and Deliver net, belonged to Bunzl.

Within two weeks the department named its seven approved wholesalers, and all seven had been at that table. The four left out were B&M Supplies, Beaucare Medical, Halliday Healthcare and Protoc. Of the eleven suppliers who met the minister that day, four are now owned by Bunzl.

A £4m contract and £35.9m of invoices

On 26 May 2020, two weeks after that meeting, the department awarded Blueleaf a contract worth £4,000,000 for surgical face masks made in China, through the VIP channel, the high-priority lane for companies with political connections or ministerial referrals.

The department's published spend data shows what it then paid. The contract was settled in two instalments in June, each of £2m, each recorded against PPE, Masks. Together they come to exactly the £4m that was awarded.

Then, over six weeks from 21 July, the department paid Blueleaf a further £31.9m in five payments. None of them names a product. Each is recorded only as "Delivery of NHS Transaction related operational efficiency".

Department of Health and Social Care published spend data. Every payment over £25,000 is published; the description is the department's own.

No other contract with Blueleaf has ever been published, and no framework involvement has been identified. The £4m was paid, and then nearly nine times that amount followed with nothing recorded about what it bought.

Buried in the company's 2020 accounts is a related-party disclosure. A company called BL Assets Unlimited, owned by the same Andrews and Campbell families who owned Blueleaf, charged commissions of £6,230,900 that year, against nothing the year before. Because it was an unlimited company it filed no public accounts, so no turnover, profit or activity was ever disclosed. It has since been dissolved. The accounts do not say what the commission was for.

Up, down, and up again

The pandemic money did not stay. Blueleaf was loss-making before 2020 and loss-making again after it, with turnover back where it started.

2024 and 2025 from the filed accounts at Companies House. Earlier figures as reported in our 2023 investigation.

Then it did the same thing again. In July 2023 Blueleaf merged with Nexon Healthcare, the Green family's care supplies business in Lincoln, another of the seven approved wholesalers and another of the three Brethren companies in the room with the minister. A new holding company, New Global Consortium Ltd, was incorporated on 15 June 2023, the month before.

Then the recovery. Revenue rose 16% between 2024 and 2025, and profit more than quadrupled, from £1.0m to £4.3m. Bunzl's "£58m" is the filed 2025 revenue almost exactly. What the announcement does not mention is the profit line. Whatever else this was, it was sold at the top of its own curve.

What Bunzl bought

It is a 100% acquisition, and it took the whole group. Companies House officer records show the Brethren directors, the Campbells, the Greens and Jonathan Andrews, resigned from all three companies, with Bunzl directors appointed in their place.

Bunzl keeps buying Brethren businesses

Four deals, three countries, four years. And it is not only Bunzl: in June 2026 Polarseal, the Rich family's business in Farnham, was sold to ADDEV Materials. John Rich sat on the GAP Global board on both of the director lists we have published, for January 2024 and July 2025. With Logan Currie and Cubro, that is two Global Advisory Panel directors whose businesses have gone to outside buyers inside three years.

Our reporting on the Brethren foundation has set out a funding model in which members give up to 15% of the proceeds when they sell their companies, and listed a run of trade sales including Arrow County to Bunzl. We cannot say what happened to the proceeds of this sale, and we are not suggesting we can.

Who was running it

Robert Critchley was an officer of all three Blueleaf companies, and is senior in Dean Hales' Ox Group; our directory records Ox Tools Global Holdings as the parent company owned by Dean Hales. He has also been an officer of a succession of Brethren businesses at the point they changed hands: Western Global, sold in 2021; Dutypoint and Elmbridge Pump Company, sold to Stuart Turner Pumps in 2024; Resipoint, sold in 2025 as part of the same transaction; and Royd ToolGroup, bought by Ox Tools in September 2024. That is five sales in five years, and now a sixth.

Ralph Green came in from the Nexon side. After the 2023 merger he became a director of the combined business. He was also a director of Unispace, later Sante Global, the Brethren-connected company that won £680m of PPE contracts and £270m of testing contracts, one of the largest single recipients of pandemic procurement in the country. He is not a director of it now. Our directory places him on eight Sante entities. Sante is the business of Bruce Hales' sons. The Lincoln half of Blueleaf therefore connects to the biggest Brethren winner of the pandemic, and through it to the Hales family.

The Lincoln connection reaches Westminster earlier than the pandemic. Peter Green of Nexon, Ralph Green's father, was photographed at an event in Parliament in January 2013 standing beside Sir Lindsay Hoyle, then Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and Speaker since 2019. Karl McCartney, the Conservative MP for Lincoln, later confirmed the identity of Peter Green in comments on the photograph.

The man who set up the vehicles

Richard Blackledge was the original director of JMA Trading, company number 07472699, the personal vehicle of Jonathan Mark Andrews. He was also the original director of a run of other unlimited trading companies registered for members of the Andrews family, among them JCA Trading, 07472692, and PAA Trading, 07472695.

Those numbers are consecutive, so the companies were registered together, in a single block in December 2010. They are unlimited companies, and an unlimited company files no public accounts. That is the same form as BL Assets Unlimited, which took £6,230,900 out of Blueleaf in 2020 and disclosed nothing.

Blackledge is not a stranger to the other side of this story. Our directory records him as a former officer of Arrow Counties Supplies and Arrow County Holdings, the two companies Bunzl bought in November 2024. He is a current officer of Universal Business Team, the Brethren's central business operation, and was an officer of Scribefort and Aller Brook, the corporate trustees of the Grace Trust, the Brethren's main UK charity.

One man, then, who incorporated the Andrews family's private vehicles, sat on the board of the last British business Bunzl bought from the Brethren, and sits inside both the movement's business arm and its largest charity.