NHS data analysts and senior health officials are quietly refusing to work with the Federated Data Platform, the £330 million data system run by Palantir. Staff have filed formal "workplace adjustments" to avoid the platform entirely, while others drag their feet when forced to use it. Critics grant the technology works. Their problem is Palantir itself: its ties to US defense work and the politics of its leadership. Still, 123 of England's 205 hospital trusts are already on board, and the project is hitting its deadlines and budget targets.
The dissenters point to alternatives. AWS or Microsoft Azure, already embedded in NHS infrastructure, could handle data collation without locking the health service into a proprietary "black box" system. Faculty, the UK AI firm that co-built the COVID-19 Data Store with Palantir, offers a more accountable domestic option. The procurement process itself drew fire for bundling software and consultancy into one massive contract, a structure that effectively froze out smaller specialists and seemed tailored to Palantir's capabilities.
Louis Mosley, Palantir's UK executive vice-chair, calls the resistance "ideologically motivated" and warns it could hurt patient care. Maybe. But spending a third of a billion pounds on data aggregation rather than frontline services raises fair questions about priorities. Ministers are now seeking advice on the contract's break clause, though actually pulling it would mean admitting a procurement went sideways. This tension goes beyond left-versus-right politics. The real question is whether the NHS should hand sensitive patient data to a company whose business model depends on defense and intelligence contracts, and whether that decision was made fairly in the first place.