Palantir has been dubbed the world’s scariest company. Trump’s favourite tech firm provides surveillance software to ICE, the Pentagon and the Israeli ministry of defence. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp talk excitedly of AI drone-driven warfare.
No wonder Andy Burnham is already facing calls to end Palantir’s controversial £330m contract to build the NHS’s Federated Data Platform (FDP).
But what exactly does Palantir do for the British state? How did it become so influential in Westminster? And does the software the NHS pays so much for actually deliver the benefits claimed?
For the past year we have been asking these questions. Now we have some answers: a major investigation published in the latest edition of the London Review of Books.
Foxglove’s Rosa Curling said our investigation is “the most important story on Palantir I have read this year. A must read for anyone interested in the UK and the health of its democracy.”
Do read the full piece in the LRB (even if you don’t subscribe, you get three free articles a month). But we also wanted to tell you today about some of the things we uncovered.
How Peter Mandelson opened doors for Palantir
In 2018, Palantir hired Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel to position it as “a respectable partner to the British government”. We found out that Palantir’s retainer with Global Counsel was worth £30,000-plus a month, and the account was so sensitive it had a code name: Project Onion.
We also uncovered how Global Counsel exploited Britain’s threadbare lobbying rules to avoid declaring Palantir as a client. “You really have to fuck up to have to register somebody,” a former Global Counsel employee told us.
For Palantir, “the NHS was the holy grail.” Years of lobbying tilted the FDP tender in Palantir’s favour.
Shane Tickell, who led a consortium of British businesses in a rival bid, told us Palantir “had all these people to open doors and lobby and pitch long before the procurement started... they used every form of influence.”
“This looks absolutely rubbish”
The problems with the FDP – which was supposed to revolutionise healthcare data in England – started early. On a Friday afternoon in May 2024, NHS England leaders summoned two hundred data analysts and engineers to a meeting – held not at NHS England’s headquarters, but at Palantir’s offices in Soho.
The FDP rollout had begun less than two months earlier, and concerns were already mounting. From a stage in Palantir’s basement auditorium, NHS bosses addressed their staff. “We all got sort of slapped down and told: you better get on with this. Or you know, things will happen,” one person present recalled.
When Palantir opened up ‘tech booths’ to demonstrate the software, one senior data analyst stood up and said: “We’ve done all this already. This looks absolutely rubbish.”
NHS trusts aren’t using Palantir’s tech
It’s not just data analysts who have been unimpressed with the FDP. Many NHS trusts are refusing to switch over to the FDP, seeing it as a downgrade on their existing systems.
NHS England says 139 trusts are ‘live’ on the FDP. But usage data we obtained under FOI shows 52 of them did not use a single one of the eight FDP apps which the NHS released data for in the twelve months to June. Cancer 360, hailed by Keir Starmer as ‘groundbreaking’, was used by just six trusts.
Privately, health service leaders admit that Palantir software has a “poor user experience” and that learning how to use its system “is a steep learning curve” even for trained professionals.
Kanthan Theivendran, an orthopaedic surgeon at a trust in Birmingham, stopped using the flagship waiting-list app because he couldn’t edit the data: “It’s just a waste of time,” he told us.
Palantir’s head of UK corporate affairs, told us the firm is merely a software provider: “How that software is used is controlled by the NHS trusts who use it.”
The NHS is locked in to Palantir
Foundry, the software behind the FDP, is proprietary – and if Palantir’s contract ended, NHS staff would lose everything on the platform. This means that a Silicon Valley tech company, run by a Trump-backing billionaire, has unprecedented power over a key British public service.
NHS analysts are often left waiting for Palantir to respond to problems. When one technician asked Palantir to fix a code problem, he waited a week – then posted a gif of tumbleweed. Colleagues joined in: a bemused Mr Bean standing in a field, a dog staring out of a window.
Even Palantir’s supporters admit this ‘vendor lock-in’ is a problem. “My worry about the Federated Data Platform wasn’t Palantir winning contracts,” a former health secretary told us, “it was Palantir winning all the contracts.”
Blowback
The NHS is now locked in a “tribal power struggle” between senior management who are ordering staff to “aggressively press ahead with deployment” and front-line clinicians and data workers who “are giving very honest feedback that the FDP in its current state cannot do what the organisation needs,” according to a staffer who is working on the rollout.
Some NHS staff have responded by silently boycotting the FDP altogether. Others have joined an internal campaign group called NHS Analysts Together which is calling for the cancellation of the FDP contract, as are two select committees.
The question now is what Andy Burnham will do about Palantir. As we found, there are serious questions about how this Silicon Valley behemoth became so embedded in the British state; whether it is really providing value for our public money – and what happens if the new prime minister decides it isn’t.
Democracy for Sale is dedicated to uncovering dark money and hidden influence. We are currently working on major new investigations and taking the government to court to force the release of key documents about Palantir’s NHS work.
If you already support our work, thank you. If you don’t, and can afford it, do become a paid supporter today. Your support makes this work possible.
Thanks for bringing this to the fore. I read an article months ago about how Palantir wasn’t delivering as advertised. This was the verdict of the nurses and doctors. It also mentioned that if the government agrees that it isn’t they will be unable to disengage it’s core so even though we say thanks but no thanks they, Palantir will still have our data. This is a scary situation that needs to be seriously investigated.
If Palantir are allowed to continue, every ounce of trust that may still exist in our politicians will be lost forever. Please carry on digging Peter and show Palantir the door.