Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system

NHS leaders privately told that “clunky” £330m platform built by Trump donor Peter Thiel’s firm is “slow” and has “poor user experience”, new documents show

Palantir’s £330 million NHS tech platform is “slow and clunky” with a “poor user experience,” according to an internal NHS document seen by Democracy for Sale.

Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting - who recently resigned as health secretary - has said that Palantir is “absolutely critical to the future of the NHS.”

But a briefing prepared for NHS England senior leaders in February said that Palantir’s NHS platform is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool in use.

“Processing time is reported as taking 4-5 minutes compared to 30 seconds [in the current system]” the briefing states, even after making “optimisation” changes to speed it up.

A senior NHS source who uses Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) every day told us the runtime is much slower still, in their experience. “I’d be happy with four or five minutes,” they said, “but usually I’m waiting closer to ten”.

For analysts who run dozens of queries a day, this means large chunks of their workday are spent simply waiting for Palantir’s system to load, a problem they didn’t previously have.

Responding to this story, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, chair of the health and social care committee, said that her committee would hold an evidence session to probe “issues around the rollout of the FDP” next month.

“There is a groundswell of concern that needs to be addressed regarding how data will be used, shared and accessed, in addition to reports about the experience of NHS staff whose lives it is supposed to make easier,” Moran told Democracy for Sale.

NHS England awarded Palantir the £330m contract to build a “new operating system” for the NHS in 2023.

Since then the UK government has faced repeated calls to cut ties with the firm founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel which works closely with US military and immigration enforcement and has a deal with Israel to support “war-related missions”.

This week London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m Met Police deal with Palantir. Ministers are also reportedly considering whether to activate a break clause in Palantir’s NHS contract in February 2027.

But Labour ministers and health service bosses have defended the NHS’s work with the defence tech firm.

Last month, outgoing NHS data chief Ming Tang claimed Palantir was delivering “outstanding results”.

Privately, however, NHS leaders have been told that Palantir’s tech is slow, hard to use and substantially worse at some tasks than the software it is supposed to replace.

The briefing seen by Democracy for Sale - prepared for NHS England’s senior leadership team for data and analytics - identifies the Federated Data Platform’s slow runtimes as a key issue hampering its adoption.

Palantir’s platform is meant to join up data across the health service and make it easier to schedule appointments, free up hospital beds and identify staff shortages.

But, as we revealed last year, many English hospitals have refused to take up the FDP. A trust in Leeds warned privately that it would “lose functionality rather than gain it” if it moved to Palantir’s platform.

Duncan McCann, head of tech at the Good Law Project, said that “the revelation that Palantir’s platform is ten times slower than existing systems strips away the final defence that their controversial reputation is a necessary trade-off for superior technology.”

Palantir rejected the claim that the FDP is markedly slower than the current NHS system and said that comparing the two systems is not like-for-like as Palantir’s platform introduces guard rails to improve data correctness, enforce purpose based access and allow more controlled data sharing.

“The Federated Data Platform is reducing the administrative burden on the NHS and its staff and helping to deliver better patient care,” a Palantir spokesperson said, pointing to 110,000 additional operations, a 15 per cent reduction in discharge delays, and almost 800,000 patients removed from waiting lists.

Palantir added that the FDP had “recently hit its target to have 85 per cent of acute Trusts live on the FDP by April 2026. And the Government has forecast that the programme will deliver £5 of benefits for every pound spent.”

NHS England did not respond to a request for comment.

The NHS and the government have repeatedly refused to release crucial information about Palantir’s performance to Democracy for Sale under Freedom of Information rules.

So last month we filed a legal case against the Department for Health and Social Care to access internal briefings about the FDP prepared for ministers.

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