The NHS has a £330 million contract with the US technology firm Palantir that was meant to modernise how the health service uses data. The programme, known as the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), was sold as core digital infrastructure: a way of linking information held across hospitals, trusts and national bodies so the NHS could better understand demand, plan services and improve care. Modernisation and digitisation fundamentally is a good idea, but it has become warped into a costly national liability, a black hole for hundreds of millions of pounds without ever delivering a finished product.
It’s a bit like subscribing to Netflix and then saying that you own the cinema.
One of the most troubling aspects of this case is that the public has never been shown how the Government’s relationship with Palantir began. We know Boris Johnson, Peter Thiel and Dominic Cummings met on 28 April 2019. We know the Government signed a £1 Covid vaccine data deal with Palantir in 2020. We know Palantir later had a lobbying relationship linked to Peter Mandelson’s firm. All of this needs to be published and presented, and the government’s deals and contracts with Palantir need to be laid bare for everyone to see.
According to the Government’s own contract tracker, the FDP exists “to unlock the power of NHS data to understand patterns, solve problems, plan services for local populations and ultimately transform the health and care of the people they serve.”. Ministers have repeatedly reinforced this ambition. When, the Department of Health and Social Care has said the contract includes provisions to ensure that “data, schemas, and operational continuity remain with the NHS.”
You might assume that these assurances mean the NHS is designing and building a tool it can use in perpetuity: something clinicians, hospital trusts and planners can rely on as part of the health service’s permanent digital foundations. That assumption is wrong.
The difference between controlling data and owning the system that makes that data usable strikes at the heart of what is wrong with this deal, and UK procurement policy that let it happen.
On March 17th, in the Science and Technology and Innovation committee, the Science Minister Lord Valance has confirmed that; “The Palantir contract was made under the previous government, and it is under a different Department. I cannot comment on the details of that, but I hope I have been clear in describing a very different way of doing contracts: putting British companies there and procuring innovation here.”
At the same committee on July 8th 2025, I put Palantir and NHS bosses under the spotlight asking questions about control, lock in and data security by design. I wasn’t satisfied by the answers and I have been questing ministers and the department ever since.
Despite the flashy sales, Palantir isn’t an AI company. It uses AI tools and consultancy that other organisations can also access and before the FDP, had no prior healthcare experience. What it does have is a clear strategy for expansion and domination. Its UK chief executive, Louis Mosley, has said Palantir wants to be the “common operating system” across healthcare and central government. At the same time, its founder Peter Thiel has publicly argued that freedom and democracy are incompatible, which raises serious questions about whether the company’s values align with those of a public health system.
The Government must now make a proactive choice to develop UK sovereign technology alternatives. Palantir openly promotes its lobbying capability, its expansion into multiple public sectors, and its ability to embed itself deeply: systems that are locked in, always requesting the next tranche of funding, and never quite complete.
What the NHS needs is a fully built, NHS owned Federated Data Platform: patient centred, secure, resilient and nationally significant. It must be a permanent public capability, not a rented service. That is how sovereign technology is built and how procurement should work when public money is meant to deliver public goods.
If this issue is not confronted honestly and soon, the NHS Federated Data Platform risks becoming a cautionary tale: a system designed to save money and improve care that instead locks the health service into spending millions more on an unfinished product.
