Politics
NHS to reevaluate Palantir effectiveness following pushback
The NHS’s contract with Palantir is controversial for a number of reasons – not least because the US spy-tech company is supporting Israel’s genocide. Another issue with the contract is that the technology Palantir provides may not actually produce any benefits. And as the Financial Times (FT) are now reporting, the NHS is having to change how it evaluates Palantir’s effectiveness in response to wide-ranging criticisms:
The pressure is mounting. Join over 83,000 people and message your local NHS Trust to say no to Palantirhttps://t.co/PsCDnjsTBl pic.twitter.com/mUhXXBbTaH
— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) August 3, 2026
Now is the time to act.
Palantir metrics of success
As reported by the FT, the NHS has been using disputed metrics to measure the success of the Palantir Federated Data Platform (FDP) which is designed to link different data sets:
Emails obtained by the FT via a freedom of information request show the health service intends to modify how it calculates two of its headline figures about the performance of the Federated Data Platform in the next quarterly update, more than a year after the data was first published.
Hospitals using the FDP have claimed to have:
delivered 110,000 additional operations and that they have registered a 15 per cent reduction in discharge delays.
One criticism of the figure is that the figure could be explained by the seasonal variation. This is because the figures relate to the six months after the FDP’s adoption.
The FT have previously uncovered errors in a “key underlying dataset”. This ultimately led to an investigation from the UK statistics watchdog.
Politicians commenting on the latest development include Ben Coleman (Labour MP / House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee):
It’s shocking that the NHS published claims about Palantir’s positive impact on patients even after its own staff raised concerns about the methodology being used.
Next March, Palantir’s contract comes to an end unless the government extends it — and given growing questions about Palantir’s effectiveness, can an extension really be justified?
Martin Wrigley (Liberal Democrat / House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee) also spoke out:
I have been calling for these numbers to be independently verified for some time now, and this is evidence that we cannot rely on them.
It is time to replace Palantir in the NHS and to seriously question their presence in the rest of the UK government.
“Say no”
The Good Law Project have a petition calling for the government to end its contract with Palantir. The petition is approaching 100,000 signatures, and it reads:
NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.
One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
We can’t let a company like this take control of our healthcare system.
But we can fight back right now. We’ve set up a simple tool so you can find out if your local NHS trust has started using the software, and then send an email demanding they say no to Palantir.
With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and James Murray, secretary of state for health.
Drop Palantir
Ministers have the option to trigger a break clause with Palantir in 2027. It’s vital that they take advantage of this, to protect the reputation of the NHS. It will also show that Britons will not tolerate companies that back genocide.
Featured image via Cory Doctorow
By Willem Moore
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