Most of us by now will have heard of the tech giant Palantir, and its deal with the NHS to build a federated data platform.

Putting to one side the influences of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Peter Mandelson in dodgy looking tech deals, revolving doors and high-pressure lobbying, the more we look into it, the more questions the NHS Palantir deal raises.  

My team and I have been investigating and asking questions in Parliament.  Last week I, (Martin) secured a Westminster Hall debate on the Palantir issue, and I made the case that Palantir’s implementation of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) has the wrong contract, the wrong solution and the wrong supplier.

I’m sure most of us at some point in our lives have looked online to try and find a program we need, only to find out to our frustration that you cannot buy it outright and must instead pay a hefty subscription cost. Now, imagine the same thing but instead of paying £50 a year you are paying over £330M that gives you no software, no improvements and no intellectual property at the end of the contract.  That’s what the last government set up. 

But let’s look past the outrageous terms and look at what the supplier has provided for the NHS in past contracts. With such a high price tag it must have excelled at previous tasks, right?

Well, sadly not.  In Autumn 2020, Palantir won a £20 million contract for a border-flow system.  After a year or two this was cancelled as it had no users and no useful function.

And then, despite having no prior expertise in health they were given a contract to help manage the data from the COVID vaccination program.   Although that contract was a loss-leader, given for free…

After that, with influence from the NHS data team, Palantir won the 3-year contract in November 2023 for a Federated Data Platform.  Intended to deliver AI insights into the NHS, this was to connect all 200-odd hospital trusts into a data warehouse and analysis tool.

This subscription service was meant to deliver 13 core capabilities. According to the national audit office and the supplier themselves, after three years they have partially delivered three or four of them.

When they appeared last year in front of the select committee that I sit on (Science, Innovation and Technology), the only improvement Palantir and the NHS team could name was an improvement in managing staff rotas to deliver a higher throughput for operating theatres. 

Now I know this has been an issue for many years in the NHS, but technology has improved vastly, and today even relatively simple apps can do the logistics to rota staff.

Also, I do wonder whether this may be down to Government improvements in staffing and pay rather than the magic of Palantir. 

In what world is this contract a good deal for the NHS?

Maybe it’s not a good deal, but at least the software will be beneficial to patients and improve treatment, right?

Well, there has been many attempts within the NHS to unify its systems through a single IT system. They have all failed bar some improvements towards it’s combined data dictionary. You would therefore expect Trusts and ICB’s to jump at the opportunity for Palantir’s FDP, but after three years we have about half of the trusts stating they are live on the FDP, with just a quarter reporting benefit.

This is no surprise, as with such a system you must either build interoperability to allow the separate and diverse NHS systems to talk to each other or build one massive system to dominate it all. Palantir’s approach of a single overarching cloak does not create interoperability and so they cast off the serious benefits of a modular system.

Palantir’s FDP cannot and will not allow GPs to see hospital treatment records or vice versa.  That would require interoperability.

Interoperability has already proven itself as the foundation for much of modern technology with the internet and telecoms networks using interoperability to communicate.

But the NHS pushes ahead with its FDP system, and in October 2025 they mandated all NHS providers of acute, community and mental health services sign up to the FDP. This is despite NHS staff reporting their complaints with the service and that they “already have similar tools in use that presently exceed the capability of what the FDP is currently trying to develop or roll out.”

With such a single point of failure, it makes it all the clearer that the NHS needs a clean break and a renewed focus on the systems that work for trusts.

With a bad deal and a bad program, it’s no surprise that supplier themselves is also controversial.

Initially funded by the CIA as a defence contractor, Palantir aims to become the default operating system for data decisions across government departments in the US, and now the UK too. Their UK CEO Louis Mosely even recommended that the UK Government develop a common operating system to combine healthcare and government data. This is just mad.

Even with all of this, one of the most important aspects of any system is trust. We trust that our emails send to the right person, we trust our data is secure. Gaining public trust for AI would already be hard enough, even without the BMJ reporting that Palantir trials have been exaggerated and untrue and the BMA stating that the potential for FDP to transform how care is delivered is only possible via a UK-owned platform with full confidence from patients and professionals.

So, if the NHS is getting a bad deal, a bad solution and a bad supplier, why does the Government insist on pushing ahead with it? 

If the NHS cannot perform a clean break with Palantir it will cost more and more – all the while failing to deliver the results, we need to make our NHS data savvy.

We can deliver a change in course.

Liberal Democrats can use this moment to shift the UK towards a genuine, sovereign technology strategy, one that actually believes in investing in UK.

And that also means cleaning up our procurement and lobbying, so our country backs competitive UK tech, and ends wasteful, lock-in, rip-off contracts.

With these kind of investments, we can lower costs across public services and boost high-skill UK jobs and tech environment, ensuring that technology spending helps ease cost-of-living pressures people face every day, and UK tech is used for good, to help our NHS and the public get the best out of the services that should be working for everyone.

This is how we can start restoring trust in how public money is spent, strengthen our economic resilience, and building a fairer, smarter economy that works for everyone.

* Martin Wrigley is the Member of Parliament for Newton Abbot and a member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee. Theo Brown and Rebecca Jones are researchers in Martin Wrigley’s office.