NHS Procurement: Palantir Contract

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. This is absolutely about enabling innovation: the data platform is there so that providers can use it to innovate. We all hear about AI, and AI depends on data. This puts in place a data platform that AI can use. It can also be used for scheduling appointments—currently done in 32 hospitals—and for the dynamic discharge of waiting lists. All those applications can work in place only if we have an open tender process, which is exactly what we are doing here, while making sure that transitions are in place so that no hospital is left in the lurch in the meantime.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, one of the issues raised during the passage of the Procurement Bill and, certainly, in the context of transparency, efficiency and getting value for money, was the keeping of some 118 million items of PPE in storage in the People’s Republic of China, at a cost of millions of pounds to British taxpayers. I have also raised this directly with the Minister. Can he give us an update as to what has happened to those items? Will they stay in storage? Are we continuing to pay and, if so, at what cost, or are we going to dispose of them? What lessons have we learned from that?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

As I said in a previous Answer, we are in the process of disposing of those contracts. On many occasions, it is easy to look with hindsight. Noble Lords may remember that, at the time, there was a massive rush and countries were gazumping each other to get hold of PPE. It was very much the feeling of this House, and all the people in the UK, that we had to desperately contract suppliers to do it. Did we make mistakes? Yes. Were we right on more than 90% of occasions? Absolutely. To keep the front line going, we needed to order more than 9 billion essential items, and we did so using the very system that we are talking about here in respect of Palantir. There are circumstances—Covid is a prime example—where it is appropriate to do those sorts of direct awards. That notwithstanding, I think we all fundamentally agree that an open, transparent and competitive tendering process will always be preferable.