The NHS can still break its £330 million contract with Palantir, but that window closes in March 2027. If ministers do nothing, the NHS faces another term tied to one of the world’s most controversial tech suppliers.
On 16 April, several MPs spoke against renewing Palantir’s NHS contract. Liberal Democrat Martin Wrigley questioned whether the contract is a sensible solution at all, and whether the Federated Data Platform (FDP) built by Palantir works as promised. Jeremy Corbyn and independent Shockat Adam went further, questioning the use of Palantir’s platform in the Gaza genocide and in ICE operations, and the ‘ethics’ of the company as a whole. As Labour MP Ian Byrne put it, Palantir deals in ‘chaos, oppression and war, all in the pursuit of power and profit—the antithesis of the values that our NHS was built on’.
The Westminster Hall debate was a significant step in the struggle to purge this bloodthirsty company from our public services. But it provides no guarantee and no mechanism to force government action. Parliamentary pressure alone has never been enough to challenge the interests of capital embedded in public institutions. The history of NHS privatisation proves it: decades of motions, debates and promises, while outsourcing marched forward.
The pressure has been building for years. In summer 2025 the BMA passed a resolution to lobby at national level for the termination of all existing NHS contracts with Palantir, calling it ‘an unacceptable choice of partner’. Foxglove began campaigning against Palantir in the NHS back in 2021, alongside numerous other organisations. Even before the contract began, Amnesty International had raised concerns over Palantir’s contracts with ICE and human rights violations against migrants and asylum seekers.
Down the Hobbit hole
Palantir’s relationship with the NHS did not begin with the FDP. The first contract, to build a Covid database, was awarded in 2020 for the symbolic price of £1, with no competition, under emergency procurement rules. Even before that, leaked files suggest a meeting took place in 2019 between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Peter Thiel, with no official records kept.
The initial terms of that first contract were only revealed after pressure from campaign groups. A second £23 million contract followed in December 2020, again with no competition. Then came the £330 million FDP contract in 2023—the largest deal in NHS history—with a one-month deadline for bids, highly unusual for a contract of this size. Palantir competed against IBM and Oracle, the latter already embedded in the NHS in a different capacity. It was considerably easier for Palantir to win: it had already been performing a similar role in the NHS for years.
The contract can run for seven years, but only if it is extended after the first three. That first term ends in March 2027, and the break-clause window is still open.
The contract delivers no permanent software asset; it is a subscription service that deepens NHS dependence on a US company. If Palantir is removed, the money is gone and all patient data leaves with it. All intellectual property written specifically for the FDP belongs to Palantir, and all rights are retained by the supplier on termination. Foundry, the software on which the FDP is built, is accessible only to Palantir engineers, making it impossible for NHS analysts to understand how the code works.
Wrigley described it as a permanent lock-in and a single point of failure. The argument against pulling out now is that the NHS already struggles to operate—losing its main cloud provider would cause massive disruption. Without building alternative services in parallel, exit is impossible. But building those alternatives would take years, and even starting now they almost certainly will not be ready by 2027.
This contract leaves control of the NHS, and the databases of the whole state, in the hands of a huge US multinational and the US state — another big step in an integration that already exists elsewhere, for example at GCHQ.
The US CLOUD Act allows American law enforcement to access data held by any US-registered cloud provider without the consent of the party using it, even if the data centre is located in the UK. We have already seen Trump threaten trade agreements with the UK over military support. Palantir in the NHS is one more pressure point. Switzerland and Germany have both pulled out of deals with Palantir over exactly this risk.
The FDP was sold as a solution to one of the NHS’s most persistent problems: departments that cannot talk to each other. If a paramedic needs to access a patient’s GP records, they cannot do it directly—they must go through the Palantir system. The reality is that Palantir has made itself the mandatory intermediary, collecting all the data it can in the process, without solving the underlying problem.
What it has solved is Palantir’s own connectivity. Foundry is fully compatible with Gotham, Palantir’s military-focused software, whose use has expanded across the UK public sector. Despite official promises that these databases will not be connected, there is no real mechanism to ensure it stays that way.
Eye of Sauron
The closer Palantir gets to each government agency, the closer we come to the blueprint already built in the US. DOGE used Foundry to connect the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services into a single master database, which was used to generate targets for ICE deportation operations. When a government holds this level of information on its citizens in totality, the result is an Orwellian surveillance state overriding democratic rights, protest movements and resistance. It also increases the state’s ability to monitor those receiving social services and to discriminate in their provision with even less accountability.
Peter Thiel is not a typical tech billionaire operating within the rules of capital. He has his own ideology, rooted in anarcho-capitalism, eugenics and authoritarianism. In his own words:
‘We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you — through technological means. This is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.’
Palantir is the instrument of that vision, not a neutral supplier that entered the NHS by accident. It is designed to entrench itself inside public institutions, erode democratic oversight and make exit impossible.
Light the beacons
A company like Palantir has no place in the NHS. That this contract was ever signed reveals not only the failures of UK procurement but the fundamental tendency of capitalist governments, Labour included, to subordinate public institutions to private capital. The March 2027 break clause is the last exit before a much longer lock-in.
Calling on the government to act is not enough. The Labour government awarded and extended these contracts, and it governs in the interests of the same class that profits from them. What compelled every meaningful gain in the history of the NHS—its creation, the defence of its founding principles, resistance to privatisation—was not parliamentary lobbying but organised working-class power.
The NHS workforce—nurses, doctors, paramedics, porters, cleaners, IT workers and administrators—are the people whose labour holds this institution together. They are also the people whose patient data feeds Palantir’s systems and whose working conditions are monitored through them. They have a direct interest in removing this company from the NHS. The BMA has committed to removing Palantir from the NHS; it should launch a joint industrial campaign with the other healthcare unions to draw the rank and file into the struggle. The campaign against Palantir must be built in the workplaces of the NHS. It must link up with the broader labour movement—particularly the PCS civil service union—and with the anti-war and pro-Palestine organising that has already identified Palantir as a key target.
Ultimately the issue raises a question: should public institutions be run for the needs of the people, or administered as data infrastructure for private capital, welfare bureaucrats and the security services, here and in the USA? A publicly owned, democratically accountable digital infrastructure for the NHS—built and controlled by workers and users—requires a movement willing to fight for it.
