NHS England deletes 137-trust Palantir benefits claim, Guardian reports

NHS England has quietly deleted the webpage listing 137 hospital trusts as “live” with and “realising benefits” from Palantir’s federated data platform, the Guardian reported.

The deletion follows the Guardian’s investigation last week, built on freedom of information requests the campaign group Medact sent to every English hospital trust, which found 29 trusts on the list were not using all or most of the system.

Some said it was not live at all; one said it never would be. In the list’s place now sits a vaguer page saying early users see “real results”.

Ministers are weighing whether to extend Palantir’s £330M contract to 2029, and the Office for Statistics Regulation is examining NHS England’s claims about how widely the platform is used. The statistics watchdog has already warned there was no evidence for the claim that the technology helped deliver 117,000 extra operations.

“When NHS England makes claims like this without checking them, it destroys trust,” Labour MP Ben Coleman, a member of the Commons health committee, told the Guardian.

Also, he warned the overclaim could put more hospitals off the platform and threaten its viability. He wants the contract scrapped in favour of an open platform British companies can build on.

The pressure is converging from several directions. Doctors Association UK, Medact, Amnesty UK, and the patients’ group Just Treatment wrote to prime minister Andy Burnham and health secretary Yvette Cooper this week opposing the reported two-year extension, arguing the deal could be safely wound down in 2027 using the contract’s termination assistance period.

The health union Unison wants it ended outright: its general secretary, Andrea Egan, told the Guardian that Palantir is a “sinister American surveillance firm”.

Palantir, which says ending the contract would be “putting politics above patients”, is lobbying hard for the extension. The company hired Labour peer Tom Watson as a full-time lobbyist in September, and he recently wrote to Cooper pitching Palantir as a builder of Britain’s sovereign technological capability, an interesting framing for a company whose presence has already drawn 44,000 objections from patients under UK GDPR.

NHS England did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

The disappearing list may say enough on its own: the strongest public evidence for the platform’s success was a page its own subjects would not vouch for.