Pressure Mounts at Labour Conference to Kick Palantir Out of NHS

The NHS’s contract with Palantir has come under pressure at Labour party conference, with 20k party members backing a motion to end the service’s reliance on the US spytech firm. 

Healthcare workers and patients protested outside the venue, calling for the government not to renew a highly controversial £330m patient data contract with Palantir.

The company provides tech to the Israeli military during its genocide in Gaza, as well as custom surveillance tools to ICE in the US.. 

A majority of Labour voters (76%)  believe Andy Burnham’s government should allow Palantir’s NHS contract to expire without renewal in February 2027.

Around 30 health workers dressed in scrubs attended the No Palantir in the NHS demo outside the conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, ahead of Burnham’s speech. 

NHS doctor Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, a campaigner at Medact, told Novara Media: “The government has the perfect opportunity to end this contract. It can do so safely and transition over to NHS-owned infrastructure. 

“Palantir’s NHS contract is a threat to the ethics we sign up to as health workers, it’s a threat to our patient relationships and data privacy, and it’s a threat to the integrity and independence of NHS infrastructure.”

Patients cannot opt out of having their sensitive healthcare data stored on Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP), and some Palantir staff are granted “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data by NHS England. 

First secretary of state Louise Haigh used her conference speech to delegates on Sunday to say Burnham’s government will refuse to “be in hock to foreign giants”, in a comment understood to be aimed at Palantir. 

The Cheltenham Constituency Labour Party (CLP) tabled a conference motion on tech sovereignty on Monday, stating that overreliance on US tech “poses unacceptable risks to the independence and security of the UK, its institutions and its people”. 

Exeter CLP called on the government to allow the NHS’s Palantir contract to expire in 2027, look to Greater Manchester’s approach as a “blueprint” and build an NHS-controlled replacement system. 

However, the motion was not chosen for debate, despite more than 20k members voting for it. 

Greater Manchester, where Burnham served as mayor for nearly a decade, has repeatedly rejected Palantir’s FDP in its NHS services, using a UK-created alternative instead. 

More protests against Palantir are set to take place across England as part of an international week of action uniting health workers and unions in the US, Brazil and Europe.