Pressure mounts from MPs on Palantir’s role in the NHS

After months of growing pressure, the question no longer appears to be whether Palantir will have its Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract terminated, but when and how it will be done to avoid triggering an expensive legal challenge, writes Jon Hoeksma.

NHS CEO Sir Jim Mackey said last week that he personally wanted to see a review of the effectiveness of the FDP and had, in recent weeks, asked the responsible team about the data being reported on benefits.

Giving evidence to the House of Commons Health and Care Select Committee on 8 July 2026, Mackey said he had personally raised questions about “whether the [NHSE’s] assessments were fully objective and would stand up if challenged”.  

He said that he’d also spoken to the team responsible for FDP about the need for an independent assessment, which he described as desirable. But he told the Health and Social Care Committee that he didn’t think it was possible to carry this out before the Palantir FDP contract had to be reviewed (due by March 2027) as it would take months to carry out.

Mackey was giving evidence alongside health secretary James Murray and permanent secretary Sam Brown, who had to recuse herself from any future decision on Palantir due to her work for Carnall Farrar, a consultancy founded by former NHSE and Department of Health senior executives. Carnall Farrar is a partner with Palantir on the FDP contract. 

The Palantir FDP contract contains a break clause that can be exercised in February 2027, allowing NHS England to exit the agreement by the end of March 2027.

However, a decision on whether to replace Palantir and which supplier or suppliers would take over would have to be made by early autumn at the latest. 

Mackey was reluctant to be drawn on commercial details, and the Secretary of State told the committee that “there is a review of a commercial arrangement under way and that does limit what we can say”.

As NHSE has been merrily publishing and trumpeting benefits figures which it is now, following a challenge, desperately rowing back from, it may find it is on difficult legal ground to terminate the Palantir contract without risking a legal challenge.  

The next day, 9 July, MPs from the Health and Social Care Committee wrote to the Health Innovation and Safety minister Preet Kaur Gill calling on her to remove US firm Palantir and its FDP, citing public “mistrust” and “contested benefits”. 

In the letter, the MPs said they doubted the efficacy of the FDP, citing public concerns about the platform and highlighting the possibility of alternative systems. They further asked the minister to commit to publish full details of assessments on commercial replacements.

In their letter, the MPs also asked the minister: “Have you received that advice and what is your assessment of whether you would be able to have a successor contract in place by March if you exited the agreement with Palantir?” and asked her to commit to share that full advice with the committee, not just the decision or outcome.  

It adds: “Can you please set out in detail, with reference to the contract, what arrangements are in place for the ownership of any intellectual property of any new products, tools and outputs developed under the FDP contract, and what consideration has been given to any intellectual property considerations that might arise, should the department choose not to extend its contract with Palantir?” 

The letter noted: “The evidence of the benefits of the current FDP is contested. While the NHS website currently lists several benefits the FDP is delivering, many of the reported benefits are based purely on comparing performance before and after the tool is introduced, without demonstrating that the improvement was due to the FDP’s introduction.”

As a result, the MPs say there is “serious mistrust” amongst the public towards Palantir, which has the potential to deter patients from sharing their medical data with the NHS. This could detract from the health service being able to realise the benefits of the shift to digital more broadly.

The letter further cites the 16 June report, Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government, by the Commons Science and Technology Committee, which recommended that “the government should commit to exercising the February 2027 break clause in the FDP contract and either develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative developed by UK-owned and UK-based providers”.  

To coincide with the letter, over 100 NHS data analysts sent a joint letter to the committee, co-signed by Unite, expressing their concern about the current contract with Palantir.

“We are writing collectively to express our serious professional, ethical and practical concerns regarding the FDP and NHS England’s contract with Palantir Technologies. 

“We do so not in opposition to digital transformation – we have dedicated our careers to exactly that – but because we believe the FDP in its current form represents a risk to patient trust, staff wellbeing, data quality, national sovereignty and the long-term integrity of NHS data infrastructure,” the joint letter reads.

As if this wasn’t enough, it followed an extremely unusual intervention by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), which on 3 July said it was reviewing NHS England’s claims regarding the FDP.

This followed the admission by NHSE under close scrutiny by the FT and MPs that publicised figures — repeatedly cited by ministers and Palantir in PR such as treating 111,000 additional patients — do not prove cause and effect. 

The dodgy figures had been published by the NHSE team responsible for data on the FDP website for over a year and claimed numerous benefits for the FDP without being able to show causation or statistical rigour.

The incident raises the obvious question of why the NHSE team supposedly focused on data and analysis was willing to publish such poor data, claiming it as evidence for a politically high-profile project.   

One very senior former official told Digital Health News that the focus had likely already shifted to how to trigger the contract break clause without leaving the government open to subsequent judicial review.   

When Fujitsu’s NHS IT contract was terminated in 2008, the subsequent legal action ran until 2018, with the government losing the case and having to pay Fujitsu £700m.  

Even if the FDP contract doesn’t create such potential litigation risks, the experience of other clients that have removed Palantir from contracts is that it can be extremely difficult to do so. 

Palantir has a reputation for extreme vendor lock-in, not least due to its forward-deployed engineers and high degree of proprietary customisation. It is precisely this risk of lock-in that the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee warned about in June.  

Finally, with Andy Burnham’s premiership due to begin in a matter of days, the potential to remove a divisive US technology supplier – with lobbying links back to Peter Mandelson – from the NHS, while promoting UK digital sovereignty, may look like an easy win and good politics.  

Jon Hoeksma is the founder of Digital Health and founder and chief executive of health IT market intelligence and research business Future Health Intelligence.