Despite the blocking of a motion at Labour conference calling on ministers to cancel Palantir’s NHS contract over the company’s links to the Israeli military, the government is still under increasing pressure not to renew the £330m deal – for other reasons as well.
The public are increasingly getting a grip on the controversy surrounding the company, which specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and software commonly used for surveillance, border enforcement, policing, and warfare. It is linked, through the right-wing politics of its billionaire founder and chair, Peter Thiel, to the US Trump administration, and its software products have been used by Israel in Gaza. as the company describes, to help the “country’s war effort”
Campaigner’s response
An International Day of Action against Palantir took place on 1 October, organised by an extraordinarily wide coalition of organisations: in Britain, the specific call for No Palantir in our NHS was backed by Global Justice Now; Good Law Project; Health Workers for a Free Palestine; Just Treatment; Keep Our NHS Public; MedAct; Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK; Pull the Plug and We Own It.
Amnesty International said the Day of Action was coordinated with a global movement of activists across North and South America, Europe and Australia: “we’re all showing up on one day to demand an end to all contracts and partnerships with Palantir.”
The pressure has led Palantir to hire former senior Labour politician Tom (now Lord) Watson as Senior Vice President to help fend off the attack, and he has begun by pressuring British ministers to renew the contract next March.
Lord Watson told the BBC:
One of the things I’d say to my former colleagues is: do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want mob rule to lead procurement practices? Because you get yourself in a lot of trouble if you go down on the latter one.
Watson’s branding of the opposition to Palantir as “mob rule” appears blinkered given the use of Palantir software in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) track down undocumented people in the US. Congressional investigations found allegations of abusive and wrongful detentions by federal immigration agents, as well as fatal shootings, and Amnesty International presents evidence of human rights violations and trauma to families and children.
For many, these events demand stronger accountability and guardrails. Watson, though, has told the Guardian that the company is ready to do the same tracking work in Britain if a far-right Reform government were elected.
Broader objections emerge
However, the case for the NHS to halt further work with Palantir on the Federated Data Platform goes beyond objections to the company’s unsavoury political alliances, its global effective corporate income tax rate of just 1.4% in 2025, and its documented provision of technology for military operations and immigration enforcement.
There are persistent and growing questions over the value for money of the FDP; the security and confidentiality of the data Palantir operatives would have access to; the extent to which the FDP shares rather than centralises data; the danger that the NHS could wind up locked into dependency on Palantir’s technology; and serious questions about whether it even works well enough to give NHS organisations access to the functions they require.
In the US, where profiteering hospital corporations have been merrily introducing Palantir technology for years, the National Nurses United (NNU) trade union recently (August 27) staged a day of action against the company in eight cities (Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, DC; New Orleans; Palo Alto, California; Portland, Maine; Asheville, North Carolina; and Austin, Texas.)
The protest highlighted the malign impact of Palantir’s technology on nursing staff and US hospitals:
In the hospital industry, already, Palantir manages more than one-fifth of U.S. hospital beds. ….
“The firm’s technology is already being used for automated scheduling and staffing in the largest for-profit hospital group in the country, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Timpani, otherwise known as HCA Inspire, is used for nursing staff scheduling, removing hospitals’ local managers from staffing decisions and replacing them with an anonymous office in Nashville.
“Even these limited applications are already exacerbating the nationwide staffing crisis, as executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgement and make critical health care decisions like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.
This wider use of Palantir’s technology is not immediately on the agenda in the NHS, but there are good reasons to be critical of the FDP, and to doubt the credibility of some of the attempts to justify extending the company’s contract by another two years next March, potentially followed by two more one-year extensions.
Suspicions were raised further when Peter Thiel told an Oxford University Union debate, with catchy lines like:
“Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,”
and suggesting the best way forward was to just “rip the whole thing from the ground and start over”, incorporating “market mechanisms”.
Doubts about contract process
Four months later, the Good Law Project revealed that Palantir had been given the contract before negotiations had even concluded, and that
In a letter of 26 February 2024, NHS lawyers said that when the contract was published in late December, 417 of its 586 pages were completely blanked out – including vitally important sections relating to data protection – because they were still ‘subject to commercial negotiation’.
The Good Law Project stated that they did not believe it was lawful for a public body to conduct negotiations after the award of a contract,
And it is difficult to understand why the NHS might want to – it is unfair to other bidders and involves trying to negotiate after having relinquished its negotiating power.
Perhaps the longest-running practical concern has been the lack of transparency around the contract NHS England drew up with Palantir in November 2023. NHSE claims “A version of the full contract is available on Contracts Finder.”
The full contract is there, but misleading: the published version of the awarded contract with Palantir has also been published – with more than 71% of its whole pages redacted to plain black. Seems like there are plenty of things government and Palantir want to hide.
Despite the change of government in July 2024, and the latest change from Starmer to Burnham, the business case still hasn’t been laid before Parliament, as NHS England promised.
Claimed benefits questioned
In August 2025, Louise Schmidt, the NHS England bureaucrat responsible for promoting the benefits of the FDP, published a blog explaining her view on “how NHS Federated Data Platform delivers benefits that matter.” She claimed it helped improve care quality and timeliness; staff productivity; infrastructure productivity; patient experience; and staff experience.
Shortly afterwards, the Health Service Journal reported that the long-term cost of the FDP contract had more than trebled, from £330m to £.04 billion over the contract’s 7-year maximum lifespan. NHS England has claimed the projected financial benefits had increased far more, from £770m to £2.5bn.
In the spring of 2026, a BMJ article entitled Palantir: NHS pilot’s “success” is questioned as second figure at major trust is linked to the tech giant questioned both the credibility of the statistics used by NHS England to demonstrate the claimed benefits of the FDP contract and the ethical issue of the links between senior trust management at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (where a major share of the dodgy statistics came from) and Palantir.
By the summer of 2026, NHS England had to issue a warning that some of its statistics did not, as claimed, prove the effectiveness of Palantir’s technology. In July more serious questions were being asked on how sound were the claims of benefits generated from the roll-out of the FDP. A Financial Times report revealed a “litany” of data errors in claims that FDP tools had helped reduce delayed discharges by 15%.
On July 22, the Office for Statistics Regulation gave NHS England a rap over the knuckles for failing to warn of the limitations of the early data it published, along with a warning:
“We expect NHS England to ensure that any figures cited by ministers or in official briefings about the FDP and its effectiveness are communicated in a clear, accurate manner.”
The FT reported one senior manager admitting being under pressure to make premature statements claiming the FDP was delivering improved efficiency before the new systems had properly been evaluated.
The Health Foundation also investigated various claims that had been published by NHS England, including claims that South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, by adopting the FDP’s discharge tool OPTICA had achieved a 37% reduction in the average number of delay days per month for patients staying in hospital for more than 21 days.
However, the Health Foundation found “no meaningful difference in delayed discharge performance in trusts that have adopted OPTICA compared to those that have not.” Worse still:
“In contrast to the significant improvement cited in the case study, we found a marked deterioration in performance at South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust after the adoption of OPTICA.”
In early August NHS England was forced into another apology – after conceding that engineers working for Palantir did have access to identifiable information about individual patients – contradicting the story it had initially told the public. Its Data Protection Impact Assessment had stated that only NHS staff could access identifiable patient information through the platform.
Dr Nicola Byrne, the national data Guardian, who had flagged up the issue and demanded a clarification from NHSE, warned:
“The intensity of interest and strength of public feeling on this issue appear to reflect not only how deeply many people care about the use of their data, and its confidentiality, but also continuing concern amongst some about Palantir’s role in the NHS.”
Back in 2024 polling by the Doctors’ Association UK found 48% of people saying they were likely to opt out if their data were held by a private company. Anything like this level of opt-out would seriously undermine the value of the underlying data for the NHS, although it would retain some potential commercial value for Palantir.
Also in August 2026, the Financial Times highlighted an official National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority report which predicted the FDP cost would increase again slightly – to £1.1m – but that the ‘benefit’ would fall far short of the early optimistic forecasts, at just £808m.
By this point, two parliamentary committees, the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, had called for ministers to terminate Palantir’s NHS contract, pointing to the public’s “serious mistrust” of the FDP and “contested” evidence on its effectiveness.
The Health and Social Care Committee has also asked for a full independent review of the effectiveness of the FDP, and NHS England has commissioned an academic partner, Imperial College London, to conduct “an independent evaluation of the impact, processes, and value for money of the NHS FDP”. This evaluation is currently in progress.
NHSE has said 139 trusts are using the FDP, but the HSJ has reported some of the largest acute trusts are yet to begin using the platform, and many of the trusts that have signed up are not actively using its core tools.
Back in April a Data Management Consultant, Tito Castillo, raised deeper and even more searching questions following the Westminster Hall debate on the FDP. He claims that the FDP is not in fact federated at all:
“… the FDP as described in the debate sits closer to a centralised model than a federated one. … Trusts become dependent on the platform for functions they previously held independently. Processing, analysis, and operational decision-making are routed through the centre rather than preserved at the component level. The distribution of control and execution is being narrowed, not maintained.”
Another key question is whether or not all of the key connecting software is owned (and therefore controlled) by Palantir. Castillo argues:
“The Member for Newton Abbot [Lib Dem Martin Wrigley], holding what he described as an unredacted copy of the contract, stated that it delivers a subscription service with no transferable software deliverables, that IP rights in specially written software are explicitly retained by the supplier [Palantir], and that the connecting code written into each NHS trust is supplier-owned.
“The Minister, in reply, stated that the NHS owns the intellectual property for all products and that it is possible to migrate them to other providers. These accounts are not compatible. One of them is wrong.
“On the available evidence, the Newton Abbot reading is the more credible.”
If the software and the connecting code used by each trust is owned by Palantir and not the NHS, the FDP contract is not, as claimed reversible. The NHS has the choice of ending the contract by December, or becoming even more deeply embroiled in a system that only Palantir owns and controls.
That is still the question, and whether Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper have the courage to cut the links with Palantir, and give the NHS the resources to develop its own capability to integrate and analyse data has yet to be shown.
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