End NHS contract with Palantir, campaigners insist after extension reports

Ministers face mounting fury over plans to extend Palantir’s £330m NHS contract, with unions, doctors and MPs warning of threats to patient privacy and public trust

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Unions, medics and two Commons committees have urged ministers to axe the US firm’s contract to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP) AI system that connects medical notes across the health service.

Today, reports emerged that ministers will extend the firm’s £330 million contract while launching a procurement process for a British alternative, with Palantir potentially replaced in two years.

The company’s billionaire founder Peter Thiel — who has questioned the “compatibility of freedom and democracy” — has contracts to supply AI to the Israeli military and the US federal government as part of president Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Lewis Backon slammed the “shameful” plans to hand “this disgraced company millions more pounds of public money.”

Palantir is “deeply complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people,” he said.

Labour’s decision to extend its contract is in “total contradiction” with Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s commitment that the British government will act against companies facilitating Israel’s illegal military occupation, he added.

Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr John Puntis warned that huge public opposition to the FDP contract relates to the unethical nature of the company, and lack of trust over data confidentiality.

It also involves concerns over “poor functioning software,” he added, which is worse than some in-house NHS systems, already resulting in low uptake by hospitals despite “constant misrepresentation of statistics purporting to show benefits.”

Citing reports this summer by the science, innovation and technology and health and social care committees, Dr Puntis added: “Dependency on Palantir has been identified as a national weakness by select committees that called for re-tendering. Continuing this dependency serves nobody’s interest except Palantir’s. 

“Prevarication would be a failure to acknowledge the risks involved and the strength of public feeling while amounting to a dereliction of government duty.”

Unison head of health Helga Pile warned that Palantir’s involvement in the NHS’s overhauling of patient data handling could “undermine the whole system.”

“Improvements to the healthcare of millions are at stake. Ministers must take the chance to break from Palantir at the earliest opportunity,” she said.

National Chair of the Socialist Health Association Dr Rathi Guhadasan said that health trusts already have systems in place which senior data officials have described as having superior functionality to the FDP.

“Adopting the FDP — which trusts did not want to do — was disruptive, with attendant patient safety risks as well,” she added.

“I urge the government to listen to experts and the public and act in the interests of patients and taxpayers by exercising the break clause at the earliest opportunity and getting this vile company out of our NHS.”

Palantir’s UK and Europe chief executive Louis Mosley said that ending its contract would be “putting politics above patients,” and accused critics of “Palantir Derangement Syndrome.”

Green Party leader Zack Polanski however said: “Labour is betraying us all by allowing the corporate capture of our most beloved institution by a genocide and Donald Trump-supporting tech corporation.”

He said the reported decision to extend the contract shows “that the huge sums of money paid to the likes of former Labour ministers Peter Mandelson and Tom Watson looks to have paid off.

“The American people this week told Donald Trump that they have had enough of large corporations taking over our democracy and public assets — Labour is doing nothing but standing down, not up, to tech, fossil fuel and privatised utility billionaires. The Green Party puts people over profit.”

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