NHS Federated Data Platform

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Let me be clear: as a practising optometrist, there is nothing more wonderful than touching a button and a patient’s data going to the right people, and I am sure that the Minister will agree. The patient can then be treated appropriately and on time. However, the Darzi and Sudlow reviews, which were published last year, confirmed that our health data system is broken and fragmented, which costs patients dearly.

The public overwhelmingly supports better data sharing and so do I. In my opinion, the question is not whether we need data sharing, but who is responsible for this modern-day oil? As has already been said, Palantir was named after the seeing stones from the book “The Lord of the Rings”, the palantíri. Those stones possessed enormous power. However, I want to be fair about them. The stones themselves were not good or evil; they were powerful instruments of vision. In the right hands, they brought clarity and wisdom. The problem, as Tolkien understood it, is never the stone itself; it is who is holding it. Let us have a look at who is holding these stones.

As has already been mentioned, Alex Karp said this year that Palantir wants

“to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.”

The co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, has written that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. He has said that the NHS is making people sick and that the British public’s love for the jewel in our crown—the national health service—is a form of Stockholm syndrome.

Those are the stated beliefs of the men at the top of a company that we have handed £330 million to, and a £1.5 billion strategic partnership with the British state. And Palantir’s ambitions do not stop there. Its chief operating officer has spoken of a future where Palantir software is inside every missile and every drone. In Gaza, Amnesty International has named Palantir as a contributor to the war crimes and genocide being committed there.

In fact, when a protester confronted Palantir’s CEO about the killing of Palestinians—100,000 and counting—in Gaza, he replied that the dead were “mostly terrorists, that’s true.” Over 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza and the CEO of the company that holds our NHS data calls them “mostly terrorists.”

It is not just the NHS that is affected. Palantir is the second largest AI supplier to the UK public sector by contract value. It has contracts with the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, local authorities and local police services, including those in Leicester South.

The Palantir contract review comes in early 2027, so the window is still open. I want to share a scan with a specialist and get an answer before my patient leaves the room; every clinician in this country wants that and every patient deserves it. But the seeing stone is only as safe as the hands that hold it. Choose those hands carefully.