UK lawmakers warn Palantir NHS contract leaves public sector exposed

Britain’s push to modernize public services has run into a hard warning: the state may be building critical infrastructure around a supplier it cannot easily escape. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said Palantir’s growing role across the public sector was an “unacceptable point of weakness,” and singled out the company’s NHS Federated Data Platform contract as the clearest example of the risk.

The NHS England deal, awarded in November 2023, is worth up to £330 million over seven years, although the contract notice describes that figure as a forecast rather than a committed amount. The platform is meant to pull together fragmented health records so clinicians can make decisions more easily, but the committee said the arrangement also raises the classic problem of vendor lock-in: once hospitals, trusts and central systems depend on one digital backbone, switching becomes slower, costlier and politically fraught. It urged ministers to consider using the break clause in February 2027 and said Palantir is not the only company capable of providing the “middleware” public bodies need.

That warning goes beyond one company. The committee said Britain’s public sector has become too dependent on a small set of American technology providers, naming Microsoft and Amazon Web Services alongside Palantir as examples of concentration risk. In the committee’s framing, the issue is not simply procurement value for money, but whether the country is outsourcing a core part of its digital sovereignty to firms whose systems, pricing and architecture can leave government with limited leverage later.

The NHS data dispute has also sharpened concerns about privacy and control. The National Data Guardian, Dr Nicola Byrne, said public trust is essential and responded to fears that external contractors could access identifiable patient information in the FDP and the related National Data Integration Tenant environment. Byrne’s office is an independent statutory body that advises rather than enforces, and she said the NDG had been involved in the programme since early on, including through three independent advisory groups. NHS England has said the platform is NHS-controlled, but the contract released in January 2024 was heavily redacted, including major sections on personal-data protection.

Palantir has pushed back by stressing its UK footprint. Its executive vice-president for the UK, Louis Mosley, told MPs in July 2025 that the company had been in Britain for about 10 years, employed 25% of its global workforce there and had paid almost £1 billion in UK taxes over the previous five years. The company’s written evidence also said London houses one of its two main research and development centres and that it works with the Ministry of Defence, the NHS and other public bodies.

The political tension is now about more than one contract. In April 2026, health minister Zubir Ahmed said the government would look at alternatives if a review found another provider could do the job better. Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP, has argued the NHS risks ending up with a subscription service that locks it in without owning intellectual property. For a health service already under pressure, the bigger question is whether digital reform can be built on systems that preserve public control rather than quietly trading it away.