NHS Federated Data Platform

Martin Wrigley 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.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. I know that, in a moment, he will come on to the point that this contract is coming to an end. I am sure that it is being reviewed by the Government—the Minister will respond on that issue—but we are encouraging them to bring the contract to a close, for the reasons that my hon. Friend is properly explaining. He will perhaps also agree that we should go through a transition period to ensure that the conditions he has described are addressed, so that the Government can benefit from the software that has been developed.

[Martin Wrigley]

I think my hon. Friend has been reading my speech in advance. I absolutely agree with him.

I see that the outgoing NHS England chief data and analytics officer, Ming Tang, has publicly joined Palantir’s fightback, saying that the system is delivering—but having introduced Palantir and lobbied to deploy it, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Given Palantir’s habit of lobbying civil servants and the revolving door from Government, I wait to see where she will end up.

I ask the Minister to review the contract, particularly in the light of the Government’s policies on investing in UK tech, value for money, technical lock-in, key performance indicators and strategic supplier status, which suppliers should have. I ask the Minister to reject extending the existing contract, which locks in the NHS forever and delivers nothing tangible.

[Susan Murray (Mid Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making some important points. Just yesterday, I highlighted the Scottish Government’s decision to buy Chinese buses, which come with a serious security risk. It would be wrong of me not to do the same when the UK Government take the same risks. We have some of the finest minds in the world here in the UK, but too frequently, we lose them to foreign firms that are out of our control. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should be developing Britain’s skills base here, and that whether it be buses or AI, we should be putting British jobs and British security first?

[Martin Wrigley]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, as do the Prime Minister and the Science and Research Minister.

Turning to the solution, the solution is wrong. There have been many attempts to unify the NHS by using a single IT system; each one has failed. In reality, we must think of the NHS as thousands of independent organisations. NHS England has been guiding organisations towards a combined data dictionary for more than 10 years, combining definitions of what data means, how it is recorded and the way it is used. After three years, about half of the 200-odd NHS trusts across 42 integrated care boards are quoted as live on the FDP, and only a quarter of them report benefits from using it.

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

My hon. Friend’s expertise in this area is impressive. I recently spent a shift with the South Western ambulance service and saw how critical it was for that service to be able to access both GP and hospital data—we had a lady who had had a heart attack, and we did not know who she was. Does my hon. Friend agree that the priority should be for the different elements of the NHS to talk to each other, rather than be scraped by a third party such as Palantir?

[Martin Wrigley]

I do agree. Palantir will not enable GPs, paramedics or anybody else to see hospital data. They will have to go through Palantir to see that data, and they will not be able to access patient records from the hospital to the GP or vice versa.

Like any data warehouse, Palantir requires connecting software that reaches into each of the NHS’s internal systems and gathers data. That data gathering is being done NHS trust by NHS trust, as there are differences inside each one. That is embedding the use of Palantir-owned code inside every NHS trust by creating custom connecting software to connect and translate data.

In Devon, the local ICB has celebrated as a major success the adoption of the same electronic patient record across Devon’s four main hospitals. It has just gone live in Torbay trust, which serves most of my Newton Abbot constituency. In an organisation as diverse as the NHS, with such distributed responsibility, we can either impose one massive system to rule them all or build interoperability. Interoperability would allow GPs to see hospital records and vice versa. Palantir is not doing that.

Interoperability is how massive systems, such as the internet or mobile phone networks, work. They do not rely on one single system or supplier. In that way, a modular system, a bit like Lego, can be constructed that, overall, is immune to changes elsewhere in the wider environment, providing only the specific data required to deliver improvements in services. That form of system builds long-term capability and delivers without requiring a locked-in, expensive subscription. It can also be built by a UK tech consortium in parallel with phasing out Palantir, which would build UK sovereign solutions, tech skills and competencies.

Meanwhile, NHS England’s October 2025 medium-term planning framework mandates all NHS providers of acute, community and mental health services to sign up to the FDP, and it demands that any existing local data analysis systems are removed. That results in further lock-in.

[Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

One of the issues that the hon. Gentleman has not discussed in his excellent speech is governance. The commissioner of the contract is the NHS, and it is also the main oversight body. He has put forward a black-and-white solution—end or maintain the contract—but is there not a case for a more robust governance structure? That could involve giving more powers to the National Data Guardian or setting up a bespoke oversight body for this contract.

[Martin Wrigley]

If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the contract, he will see that it is subscription only: deliveries under supplier software—none; deliveries under third-party software—none. Any programming written under the contract is owned by Palantir. The contract has to be adapted for any next phase so that Palantir can be moved out.

Palantir is not only the wrong technical solution; NHS users report that it is awful to use. An open letter to NHS England said:

“we already have similar tools in use that presently exceed the capability and application of what the FDP is currently trying to develop or roll out”.

An NHS worker said:

“We’re being forced to use a convoluted system that makes even the simplest tasks feel like pulling teeth. It’s demoralising, and honestly, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and public money”.

An NHS data analyst said:

“Not only could similar functionality have been delivered at a fraction of the cost, but the existing tools are already better integrated, more intuitive, and more conducive to collaboration”.

In early 2025, Greater Manchester ICB reported that the FDP

“does not currently have any system-level products that offer the same or better functionality, compared to the custom-built system already in use for NHS GM”.

An NHS developer concerned about Palantir wrote to me to say:

“There are any number of reassuringly boring companies that could deliver this contract, many of them based in the UK, and then we could just get on with the exciting work of using technology to improve care for our patients”—

quite right too.

We must halt this path of chaos before the costs build any higher. I ask the Minister to use the change from NHS England to allow a change of direction towards a distributed, interoperable UK sovereign solution. Will the Minister cancel the expansion of the FDP to community and mental health service providers?

Palantir is the wrong supplier. Its name comes from a magical seeing stone in “The Lord of the Rings”. It is how the evil lord Sauron corrupted the good wizard Saruman—I think we should have known at the beginning. Funded initially by the CIA as a defence contractor, Palantir’s vision is to become the default operating system for data-driven decisions in high-stakes institutions.

Palantir’s chair, Peter Thiel, wrote:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He has warned about the coming of the Antichrist in the form of an oppressive world government. Palantir’s stated aim is to have domination over most Government Departments across the US and allies, including healthcare Departments. Louis Mosley of Palantir UK recommended that the UK Government develop a “common operating system”, combining healthcare and central Government data. That is just mad.

Palantir is a company that builds lock-in into its architecture as a clear business tactic. Palantir’s Foundry system was installed for £1 to manage covid vaccination programmes, after high-pressure lobbying and persuasion. It bought the advantage for future contracts by providing the system for free. The company had no healthcare experience prior to the pandemic, and demonstrates a lack of data security by design. However, the main issue is trust. The future of the NHS depends on intelligent use of data with patients’ trust. Gaining the public’s trust for research that involves AI will be hard enough anyway, without a company like Palantir controlling it all.

Palantir and its NHS England advocates claim big benefits for the NHS. The BMJ this week published analysis of the initial Palantir trial at Chelsea and Westminster hospital that shows the benefits to be exaggerated and untrue. The National Audit Office has yet to assess the value of the deliveries to date and cannot confirm the numbers in Palantir’s claims. Even if we accept that Palantir has delivered some benefits, they are hardly worth £330 million or the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority’s estimated whole-life cost of over £1 billion.

In addition, Palantir’s history with the Government is not good. After secret meetings and intensive lobbying in 2020, Palantir won a £27 million border control contract—without competitive tender, just like the Ministry of Defence contracts. The border system was subsequently terminated as it had no users and no value.

We need to replace Palantir, the chaotic, all-seeing, single-point-of-failure, data-hungry AI solution. We need a well-architectured, security-by-design, resilient and nationally significant bedrock FDP in the NHS for years to come that must be powered by UK technology. That will build UK skills and business, pay dividends for years to come and build trust from the UK public. The British Medical Association says that

“an FDP has the potential to transform how care is delivered, but only if it is done right—via a UK-owned FDP that has the full confidence and support of the profession and patients.”

I ask the Minister to take action now to stop the expansion of the Palantir solution, to review the dreadful subscription contract with Palantir, and to rebuild the FDP project to deliver a sound, sovereign system to make our NHS thrive in the world of data-driven health.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Wrigley]

I thank the Minister for his comments. However, I do not think he has been accurately informed about the status of the contract. I have the unredacted contract with me, which says nothing about software delivery. The whole thing is based on subscription, and the intellectual property of all specially written software, which is defined to include the data collection software, belongs to Palantir. None of this belongs to NHS. That is in this contract—I can show it to the Minister, if he likes. I thank him for his agreement to work towards a better future for our constituents, and we all agree that what we need is a trustable route forward in working with data that will make the NHS a real force in the 21st century.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the NHS Federated Data Platform.