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The government is preparing to extend Palantir’s controversial NHS contract despite growing concerns over its software’s performance and widespread reluctance across hospitals to use it.
MPs, medics and campaigners have urged Health Secretary Yvette Cooper to trigger an early “break clause” in February, said the Financial Times. But ministers reviewing the £330 million deal to deploy the US tech giant’s flagship AI system have concluded that removing Palantir would be “too disruptive”.
What is Palantir’s contract with the NHS?
In 2023, NHS England awarded a Palantir-led consortium a contract to link datasets across hospitals and trusts. The result, the Federated Data Platform (FDP), is powered by Palantir’s Foundry software and loaned out to NHS teams to build applications, coordinate patient records, schedule procedures and reduce waiting lists.
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The deal was controversial from the off due to Palantir’s work with US immigration enforcement and the Israeli military. Officials privately warned Wes Streeting, then health secretary, last year that Palantir’s reputation would deter NHS trusts from using its software, said The Guardian in February. Accusations that the procurement process was rigged also deepened after it emerged that Palantir had hired Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm ahead of the successful bid.
In June, the Commons Health and Social Care Committee recommended that the contract not be extended. “People don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages,” said committee member and Labour MP Ben Coleman in The Guardian.
Has its software helped the NHS?
The NHS and government claims of benefits are fiercely contested. Many doctors say the FDP is less effective than existing technology; some senior NHS leaders called it “slow and clunky”, said Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books.
Active usage is far lower than official claims suggest. NHS England said that, as of June this year, 139 NHS trusts were “live” on Palantir’s software. But 52 of them “did not use a single FDP app”, said the LRB, citing a Department of Health and Social Care official.
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NHS England claims Palantir’s patient discharge tool was responsible for a 15% decrease in delayed discharges. But the Health Foundation think tank reported that hospitals using the tool saw “no noticeable improvement” compared with those that didn’t, said The BMJ.
Palantir has claimed it is helping to deliver “99,000 more NHS operations”, but digital rights advocacy group Foxglove says that nearly a third of NHS trusts using Palantir’s theatre scheduling tool performed fewer procedures after it was deployed.
In July, the Office for Statistics Regulation said that NHS England lacked sufficient evidence for its claims that the FDP was directly responsible for performance improvements.
What might happen next?
The National Audit Office, the independent public spending watchdog, is reviewing the rollout and costs of the FDP, and will publish a report this winter. NHS England also commissioned Imperial College London to evaluate clinical outcomes, with that final report due in 2029.
The government’s review of Palantir’s contract is still under way, but Cooper told MPs she wanted to use the NHS “to develop UK sovereign AI”. The government is planning to put the FDP contract out to tender, said The BMJ. That would force Palantir to “rebid against UK-based competitors”.
Health officials have been “sounding out a handful of British companies to bid to run the FDP”, said the FT. Rivals “insist they are ready to take over the contract”, but Palantir’s defenders claim switching to “an untested alternative” would be “a significant gamble”.
Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.
