NHS England removes Palantir list after 29 report limited use

By Daniel Okafor

NHS England removed a website claim that 137 hospital trusts were benefiting from Palantir’s AI health data platform after the Guardian reported that 29 were not using all or most of the technology.

Twenty-nine of the 137 listed trusts amounted to more than one in five. The Guardian reported that some said the FDP was not live; others used none of its applications. NHS England’s original page listed bodies “live” with and “realising benefits” from the platform. That list now appears to have been taken down.

NHS England said the federated data platform, or FDP, aimed to:

• Improve patient outcomes
• Boost operating theatre efficiency
• Speed up hospital bed discharges

The aims joined clinical performance to operating efficiency and patient flow. The page therefore presented deployment as evidence of results. The 29 responses broke that link between installation and benefit.

A less detailed NHS England page says early users were “already seeing real results – reduced admin, faster patient pathways, and more time for care”.

What does the deletion change?

The deletion does not end scrutiny. The Office for Statistics Regulation said it was examining NHS claims about how widely the system was used. Ben Coleman and other contract opponents say those claims made the technology appear more embedded in the health service than it was.

OSR had also warned NHS England that it had no evidence to support a claim that the FDP had helped deliver more than 100,000 additional operations.

Ben Coleman, a Labour MP on the Commons health and social care select committee, called the listing “troubling” because NHS England “apparently pulled the list when 29 said they weren’t using all or most of it”.

“When NHS England makes claims like this without checking them, it destroys trust – and it has happened before,” Coleman said. “The statistics watchdog warned there was no evidence for the NHS’s claim of 117,000 extra operations due to the FDP. This latest overclaim could put more hospitals off using the FDP and threaten its viability.”

Coleman wants the NHS to drop Palantir and build an open data platform that trusts and British technology companies can use to develop tools.

Who wants the £330m contract ended?

NHS England hired Palantir to manage vast quantities of medical data. Medact and other campaigners, MPs and doctors’ unions want the contract scrapped, often arguing that its effectiveness has been overstated.

Some opponents also challenge Palantir’s presence in the health service. The company was founded by Donald Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel and also works for the Israeli military and the US administration’s ICE immigration crackdown.

Medact, a health justice campaign group, researched actual use by sending freedom of information requests to every hospital and integrated care board in England. NHS England took down the list after that research and the trust responses.

“It’s a relief to see these webpages taken down, but this has only happened after multiple investigations exposed the misleading nature of NHS England’s claims,” said Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, an NHS doctor and Medact spokesperson.

She added: “The question remains, why did NHSE [NHS England] spend years using shaky evidence to promote the alleged ‘benefits’ of Palantir software?”

What could ministers decide next?

The Guardian reported that Palantir’s contract is worth £330m and that ministers are weighing an extension to 2029. Last week, it reported a planned extension amid intense lobbying.

Palantir hired Labour peer Tom Watson as a full-time lobbyist. Watson recently wrote to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper, saying Palantir wanted to “build Britain’s sovereign technological capability”.

The health workers’ union Unison wants the contract ended. Its general secretary, Andrea Egan, told the Guardian that extending the deal would be “completely unacceptable and a betrayal of staff and patients”.

Palantir said ending its contract would be “putting politics above patients”. Egan called it a “sinister American surveillance firm” and said allowing it to hold a vital NHS contract “surrenders sovereignty over our most sensitive data and poses security risks”.

Groups including the Doctors Association UK, Medact, Amnesty UK and Just Treatment, a patients’ group, also wrote this week to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Cooper. They opposed a Labour plan, reported by the Guardian, to give Palantir another two years before a transition to UK-based technology.

The groups say the deal could end safely in 2027 through the contract’s “termination assistance period”, which would let NHS trusts transition away from Palantir’s technology.

They warned: “Ministers could risk looking as if they were saying one thing and doing another if they said they were planning for a future without Palantir while simultaneously handing it two more years to embed itself further into our health service.”

NHS England did not respond to requests for comment. The OSR review now sits beside the contract decision. Renewing through 2029 would make the disputed FDP a longer-term layer of NHS infrastructure; ending it in 2027 would require trusts to complete the transition during the termination assistance period.