NHS Federated Data Platform

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the NHS Federated Data Platform.

We are at a key time for the NHS as it changes from analogue to digital, and data is key to achieving better health results for all our constituents, as well as to the future of the NHS. AI analysis of scans can spot patterns of disease before the human eye, and modern communications can be much more effective than sending letters, which often arrive late. We are, however, at a junction where we can correct a series of mistakes made in the direction of travel in this process. I ask the Government to mind the gap between expectation and reality. We can and need to change.

In November 2023, a contract for services approaching £500 million was signed for the federated data platform. The Government’s contracts tracker describes a data platform owned and controlled by the NHS

“to unlock the power of NHS data to understand patterns, solve problems, plan services for local populations and ultimately transform the health and care of the people they serve.”

Sadly, the FDP developed by Palantir is far from that description.

The NHS is an inherently distributed organisation, with trusts in charge of their own IT. Although NHS England has been working on a unified data dictionary and standards, imposing a single central IT solution has yet to work. Indeed, a single central system can become a single point of failure. Such a critical element of national infrastructure must be under full control, fully owned and trusted.

Although I understand the appeal of a slick salesman who persuades that they can solve all the problems in the NHS, build that one system to bind them all, and use AI like magic to provide all the answers, sadly, it is not reality. Is Palantir’s FDP a product that the NHS can own and trust, or have we bought the emperor’s new clothes that, after huge investment, leave us with nothing? I will outline why this solution is wrong in three significant points: the contract is wrong, the solution is wrong and the supplier is wrong and simply not delivering on its promises.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool Riverside) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate at this critical point. Does he agree that the opaque procurement of the Palantir contract, one of Mandelson’s dodgy deals, is deeply concerning? Does he agree that the full details of Mandelson and the Prime Minister’s visit to the Palantir headquarters in 2025 must be made public?

[Martin Wrigley]

I agree with the hon. Lady entirely. The secret meeting in 2019 between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and Peter Thiel—the founder and chair of Palantir—that started this whole thing, for which there are no minutes, must be clarified as well.

I ask the Minister to consider using the contract renewal point to stop the chaotic expansion of the Palantir platform monopoly, to work to a staged exit with a retender for British companies to build a replacement for Palantir, and to deliver a better, long-term solution providing British sovereign capabilities in line with principles outlined by the Science and Research Minister and the Prime Minister.

The current contract delivers a subscription service that leaves no deliverables after the subscription—no software, no improvements and no intellectual property after spending more than £330 million. All the specially written software and intellectual property rights belong to the supplier, says the contract. All the rights to any know-how are explicitly retained by the supplier and not passed across on termination of the contract. The contract delivers no software—not one line—just a subscribed service; a permanent lock-in; a single point of failure.

Why are we building a leased service wrapped in glossy marketing promises, rather than a product that the NHS can own and trust? We are paying the supplier to hire Accenture, PwC, NHS experts and consultants to create a solution that we do not own—the supplier does. It uses external AI platforms from OpenAI and Anthropic and brings questionable value itself. Prior to it buying an opportunity to provide its system to help manage the data from the covid vaccine programme, the supplier had no expertise in health.

The three-year contract asks for 13 core capabilities to be delivered. According to the National Audit Office and the supplier, after nearly three years, it has partially delivered on three or four of those capabilities. Hon. Members may have received letters from the supplier, which has also taken to sponsoring newsletters that we see every day.

When in front of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, the only benefit offered by the supplier and by NHS England was an improvement in managing staff rotas to deliver a higher operation throughput, which these days can be done by a relatively simple app. That is beneficial, but it perhaps relates more to the Government’s improvements in staffing and pay than to any magic from Palantir. It claims to have achieved waiting list reductions by removing people who do not respond to messages, but there is no external scrutiny or validation of results. This is a dreadful contract, and it is not in the national interest.