It’s been a bad few months for US spy-tech company Palantir. Last week it was revealed that London… The post ‘Khan is right to block Palantir deal – now let’s cancel their NHS contract’ appeared first on LabourList.
It’s been a bad few months for US spy-tech company Palantir.
Last week it was revealed that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had intervened to block a £50m Metropolitan police deal with the controversial company, having previously cited concerns about their “values”. Palantir’s leadership lashed out at Khan, accusing him of “putting politics over public safety”. They are rattled, and they have good reason to be.
Khan’s move is just the latest in a suite of examples where Palantir has been rejected. In December 2025 it was revealed that despite a seven-year lobbying effort by Palantir, the Swiss government turned down the company over fears that US intelligence might gain access to sensitive data. Then in March of this year, New York City’s public hospital system announced it would not be renewing its Palantir contract, following a sustained community campaign.
The world is waking up to the agenda of Palantir – and those concerns are being reflected here in the UK too.
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Parliamentarians from at least seven different political parties have spoken out in recent weeks about the risks of Palantir becoming embedded in our public services. This comes after years of campaigning by patients, health workers and privacy campaigners against the £330m contract awarded to Palantir to manage a giant database of NHS health information – called the ‘Federated Data Platform’ (FDP). Public and political pressure is growing, and it’s now being reported that government ministers are actively exploring triggering the break clause in the contract.
As a patient-led organisation, we recognise the enormous potential of health data to improve patient care and advance medical planning and research. NHS patients want their data to be used to benefit their own health and the health of the nation – but they want to have a say over how this is done, and they certainly do not want their most precious personal information in the hands of a US company with a track record in surveillance and military technology.
But this isn’t just about Palantir’s deeply controversial human rights record and complicity in the horror being enacted in Gaza. There are also a growing number of concerns around the functionality and reliability of Palantir’s technology itself.
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Just a few days ago, leaked documents revealed that senior NHS leaders were briefed by staff who utilise the Federated Data Platform that it is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool. Some NHS Trusts have so far refused to adopt the FDP, such as Greater Manchester ICB, who have said that their existing capability in data analytics is greater than the FDP offers.
It would seem that ever since the procurement process began for this huge NHS contract, the British public have been misled.
We were told Palantir won the contract fair and square. Yet we now know that senior government representatives were privately courted, wined and dined in a years-long lobbying effort that began before the procurement even opened. This also involved Global Counsel – the lobbying firm of disgraced Epstein-linked former US Ambassador Peter Mandelson.
We were told that Palantir’s technology was the best in the business. We now know that there are NHS data experts who refute this and have opted to use more efficient pre-existing systems instead, and that data used to justify the FDP rollout was deeply flawed.
We were told our health data was safe and would not be directly shared with Palantir. It’s now been revealed that Palantir contractors will be granted ‘unlimited access’ to identifiable patient data.
How many more leaks or scandals will it take for the government to admit that Palantir is a wholly inappropriate and dangerous partner for our NHS?
Ministers have said that a decision will be made on whether to trigger the break clause in Palantir’s contract later this year. So the Labour leadership – whether it’s Keir Starmer or someone new – has an opportunity to right this wrong and chart a different way forward for the management of patient health data.Subscribe here to our daily newsletter roundup of Labour news, analysis and comment– and follow us on TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp, X and Facebook. You can also write to our editor to share your thoughts on our stories and share your own. The best letters are published every Sunday.
Keeping Palantir in our NHS would not only decimate trust amongst patients and staff, but it would push us further down the path of a dangerous “vendor lock-in” situation, which would embed Palantir at the heart of our public services and make us reliant on them for years and even decades to come.
A new approach is urgently needed; one that centres on health data systems and technologies that are publicly owned and democratically controlled, and which strengthen and improve our public services rather than weaponising and extracting profit from them.
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The post ‘Khan is right to block Palantir deal – now let’s cancel their NHS contract’ appeared first on LabourList.
