Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break
£330M deal leaves service with no ownership of software built to connect trusts to the platform
The UK government is considering ending Palantir's involvement in a central NHS data platform after coming under fire from MPs, unions, and campaigners.
Speaking before a heated debate in Westminster Hall, Zubir Ahmed MP, junior minister for the Department of Health and Social Care, said the £330 million contract between one of the world's largest healthcare providers and the controversial US spy-tech firm could end short of its planned seven years owing to a break clause next spring.
"My north star is always patient safety and quality, and of course value for money. If, at the point of the break clause, we evaluate and find that there are other providers that can do the job better, then of course that needs to be looked at and reflected upon," he said.
Ahmed was responding to calls led by Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley, who told the meeting he has evidence the Federated Data Platform (FDP) is awful to use, only benefits a quarter of its user organizations, and leaves the NHS owning no intellectual property for connecting software.
"The current contract delivers a subscription service that leaves no deliverables after the subscription – no software, no improvements and no intellectual property after spending more than £330 million. All the specially written software and intellectual property rights belong to the supplier, says the contract. All the rights to any know-how are explicitly retained by the supplier and not passed across on termination of the contract. The contract delivers no software – not one line – just a subscribed service; a permanent lock-in; a single point of failure," Wrigley said.
"I ask the minister to consider using the contract renewal point to stop the chaotic expansion of the Palantir platform monopoly, to work to a staged exit with a re-tender for British companies to build a replacement for Palantir, and to deliver a better, long-term solution providing British sovereign capabilities in line with principles outlined by the Science and Research Minister and the Prime Minister."
Last month, MPs pressed science minister Patrick Vallance over the Palantir contract. He promised a different approach after the break clause in the contract in line with recent sovereign tech policy.
Wrigley said the initial three-year Palantir contract called for 13 core capabilities but had delivered only three or four of them, and then only partially. Approximately 200 NHS trusts had announced plans to join the FDP, but only about half were live and only a quarter reported benefits from using the system.
"Palantir is not only the wrong technical solution; NHS users report that it is awful to use," he said.
Wrigley quoted an open letter to NHS England – the soon-to-be-defunct quango responsible for the Palantir procurement – which said data analytics professionals in the NHS already have similar tools that exceed the capability of the FDP. Another letter said it was a convoluted system that was demoralizing to use.
The Liberal Democrat MP said the Palantir system requires specially written software to connect to internal trust systems and gather data.
"That data gathering is being done NHS trust by NHS trust, as there are differences inside each one. That is embedding the use of Palantir-owned code inside every NHS trust by creating custom connecting software to connect and translate data," he said.
Palantir won the FDP contract as part of a bid to work with consultancies Accenture and PwC, as well as NECS, an NHS-owned service provider, and Carnall Farrar, a healthcare consulting and data firm.
Its success followed the award of £60 million in uncompleted contracts for similar work during the pandemic, starting with an award for just £1 [PDF] in 2020.
A number of MPs speaking in the debate criticized the transparency of the procurement.
Wrigley said: "The secret meeting in 2019 between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and Peter Thiel – the founder and chair of Palantir – that started this whole thing, for which there are no minutes, must be clarified as well."
A number of MPs also drew attention to Palantir's work in the US and Israel, where it helps security forces and immigration agencies. They also criticized the far-right positions espoused by founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp.
Wrigley said: "The main issue is trust. The future of the NHS depends on intelligent use of data with patients' trust. Gaining the public's trust for research that involves AI will be hard enough anyway, without a company like Palantir controlling it all."
Junior minister Ahmed said he was "no fan" of Palantir's politics but the FDP and the principles that underpin it were critical to the future of the NHS.
"The NHS FDP in England connects health information held in different systems, helping to manage activity to improve productivity and outcomes. By connecting critical data streams, it can accelerate diagnosis pathways, streamline discharge processes, and ensure faster, more coordinated care that reduces waiting times for all patients," he said.
Ahmed said Palantir does not own the data, the products, or the intellectual property, nor can it use the NHS data for its own purposes.
Wrigley said the contract specifies that intellectual property for all specially written software, which is defined to include the data collection software, belongs to Palantir.
NHS England FDP procurement received bids from Quantexa, a British company, in tandem with IBM, and from Oracle Cerner, as well as the winning bid from the Palantir group. Palantir's main processing engine is based on open source technology Apache Spark. Other vendors that provide platforms around Spark – such as Databricks, Snowflake, Google Cloud, and Cloudera – were not involved in any bids. ®