UK lawmakers urge break clause on Palantir's underused NHS contract

Incoming prime minister Andy Burnham faces immediate pressure to terminate a £330m contract between the NHS and Palantir after two parliamentary committees urged the government to exercise a break clause when the deal comes up for renewal next year. The science, innovation and technology committee has already warned of a “clear mismatch with UK values” in working with the US defence tech firm.

Despite NHS England claiming that almost two-thirds of NHS trusts are “live” on Palantir’s Foundry software since its 2024 launch, internal data obtained under freedom of information laws suggests otherwise. Dozens of these trusts appear not to have logged into a single application on the federated data platform in the past year. A Cancer 360 tool, which Keir Starmer called “groundbreaking new technology” that would “slash treatment delays across the NHS”, was used by just six out of about 200 trusts in its first nine months.

Clinicians have largely avoided the platform on practical rather than ideological grounds, with analysts reporting that basic queries can take over five minutes. Senior NHS leaders have privately criticised a “poor user experience”, and Kanthan Theivendran, a Birmingham orthopaedic surgeon, stopped using the waiting-list app entirely: “It’s just a waste of time,” he said. Palantir stated that “how that software is used is controlled by the NHS trusts who use it” and argued the platform cannot be compared “like for like” due to “additional security”.

Cost and lock-in risks

The true financial burden of the contract extends well beyond the headline £330m figure. Individual trusts received up to £3m each for implementation, while consultancy KPMG secured an £8.5m contract to push the platform across the health service. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has already demonstrated an alternative path, saving millions of pounds annually after ditching Palantir’s “confusing to use” software for an in-house system.

A deeper concern for European public infrastructure is vendor lock-in. Foundry is a proprietary product, meaning NHS data analysts risk losing their work if they lose access to the platform. The Ministry of Defence, which recently signed a strategic partnership to spend up to £750m on Palantir defence technology over five years, has admitted it is becoming “locked in” to the software. For a company whose clients include the CIA, Donald Trump’s ICE and the Israel Defense Forces, this dependency poses distinct national security questions.

Palantir’s rapid expansion into the British state was facilitated by aggressive lobbying that exploited regulatory gaps. The firm paid Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel more than £30,000 a month under the internal code name Project Onion. A former employee noted that under current rules, “You really have to fuck up to have to register somebody,” as policy briefings do not count as paid advocacy. Starmer met Palantir chief Alex Karp in Washington DC last year, though No 10 has refused to disclose what was discussed.

The UK Statistics Authority is now investigating how NHS England promoted the software's benefits. As former Conservative party adviser Camilla Cavendish wrote: “To me, what matters is what works.” For European governments watching London’s experience, the Palantir contract illustrates the high cost of outsourcing critical state data to proprietary US tech platforms.