\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>ndy Burnham faces a lot of big decisions. But one of the incoming prime minister\u2019s biggest early tests is what he does about the world\u2019s \u201cscariest company\u201d \u2013 Palantir. The US defence and surveillance tech behemoth has a swathe of British public contracts, including, most controversially, a \u00a3330m deal with the NHS. It\u2019s pretty clear what many of Burnham\u2019s new parliamentary colleagues want him to do: the science, innovation and technology committee says the government should ditch Palantir and its \u201cclear mismatch with UK values\u201d.<\/p>\n Peter Thiel and Alex Karp\u2019s company is not without British backers. The Times <\/em>and the Telegraph <\/em>have been enthusiastic supporters. In the Financial Times <\/em>last month former Conservative party adviser Camilla Cavendish accused Palantir\u2019s critics of putting politics over progress: \u201cTo me, what matters is what works.\u201d<\/p>\n But does Palantir work for Britain? Does the \u00a3330m federated data platform (FDP) live up to the claims of Palantir and NHS England? Has it delivered the much-vaunted digital revolution in our healthcare system?<\/p>\n These are questions my Democracy for Sale colleague Lucas Amin and I have been investigating for the past year. We spoke to NHS whistleblowers and Palantir staff, obtained confidential documents and unearthed new data. Our findings, published in the London Review of Books, raise serious questions about the efficacy of Palantir\u2019s technology, about the approach of NHS senior leaders and about the lobbying that helped a Silicon Valley startup expand so quickly in Britain.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the most important part of Palantir\u2019s British operation: the FDP. Built on the company\u2019s Foundry software, the platform was sold as a generational chance to knit disparate data from hospitals, doctors, pharmacists and myriad other sites together into a coherent whole. You\u2019d struggle to find anyone in the NHS who would oppose that.<\/p>\n NHS England cites impressive statistics for the FDP\u2019s rollout since it launched in 2024. It says almost two-thirds of NHS trusts are \u201clive\u201d on Palantir\u2019s software. Politicians and NHS leaders have hailed the FDP as a success. But drill a little deeper and you\u2019ll find another story. Dozens of the trusts that NHS England says are using the FDP appear not to have logged into a single FDP app in the past year, according to internal usage data released under the Freedom of Information Act.<\/p>\n The Cancer 360 tool, which Keir Starmer lauded last year as \u201cgroundbreaking new technology\u201d that would \u201cslash treatment delays across the NHS\u201d, was used by just six <\/strong>out of about 200 trusts in the nine months since it launched. (Palantir told us that the firm is merely a software provider: \u201cHow that software is used is controlled by the NHS trusts who use it.\u201d)<\/p>\n Clinicians\u2019 reluctance around using Palantir\u2019s software is less ideological \u2013 although some object on this basis, too \u2013 <\/strong>and more practical: many trusts say that the FDP is slower and less effective than their existing technology. NHS analysts say it can take five minutes or more to run a basic query. As NHS Greater Manchester\u2019s chief data officer told the health select committee last month: \u201cWe can match anything that the Palantir FDP can do.\u201d Palantir says the FDP could not be compared \u201clike for like\u201d with other systems because of the \u201cadditional security\u201d embedded in it.<\/p>\n In private briefings we obtained, senior NHS leaders went even further, complaining that Palantir\u2019s software has a \u201cpoor user experience\u201d. Kanthan Theivendran, an orthopaedic surgeon at a trust in Birmingham, stopped using Palantir\u2019s flagship waiting-list app because he couldn\u2019t edit the data: \u201cIt\u2019s just a waste of time,\u201d he told us.<\/p>\n The true cost of Palantir\u2019s FDP is much greater than \u00a3330m. Individual trusts have been given as much as \u00a33m each to encourage implementation. Consultancy giant KPMG was even given an \u00a38.5m contract to push the FDP across the health service.<\/p>\n Among the biggest challenges is Palantir\u2019s own software. Foundry is a proprietary product. Some NHS data analysts told us that all their work on the FDP would be lost if they no longer had access to Palantir\u2019s platform. This raises concerns over what many experts call \u201cvendor lock in\u201d. Once you start using a Silicon Valley tech company\u2019s product, it can be very hard to move off it \u2013 even if you are dissatisfied with the service. Vendor lock in is bad enough if you\u2019re changing smartphones. But when the company that has all your data is working for Donald Trump\u2019s ICE, the Israel Defense Forces and heralding the arrival of AI-fuelled global warfare, the problem is not inconvenience, it\u2019s a national security issue.<\/p>\n So how did a Silicon Valley startup that counts the CIA\u2019s investment arm as an early customer become so integral to the British state? The answer, in large part, is paid-for political access and threadbare regulations.<\/p>\n In 2018, Palantir hired Peter Mandelson\u2019s lobbying firm Global Counsel to position it as \u201ca respectable partner to the British government\u201d. Global Counsel organised dinners for Palantir with policymakers and politicians but did not have to declare their client on official disclosures, as policy briefings are not classified as paid advocacy. As a former Global Counsel employee who worked on the Palantir contract told us: \u201cYou really have to fuck up to have to register somebody.\u201d <\/p>\n Palantir was one of Global Counsel\u2019s biggest clients, on a monthly retainer worth more than \u00a330,000. The account was so sensitive it had an internal code name: Project Onion. When Starmer visited Washington DC with Mandelson last year he also met Karp and Palantir\u2019s UK boss, Louis Mosley. (No 10 has repeatedly refused to say what they discussed.)<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Mandelson\u2019s spectacular fall took Global Counsel with it \u2013 the company is now in administration \u2013 but has had little discernible impact on Palantir\u2019s political access. Palantir now has had contracts with everyone from the Financial Conduct Authority to the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Last year, the Ministry of Defence signed a strategic partnership with Karp, agreeing to spend up to \u00a3750m on the firm\u2019s defence technology over the next five years.<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s expansion into the British state has not been quiet. Its nefarious self-mythology guarantees headlines. Petitions against Palantir contracts have attracted about 230,000 signatures. Protests outside its London offices are frequent. But too often a crucial question goes unasked: is Palantir value for money for Britain? There are reasons to be sceptical. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government says it is now saving millions of pounds per year after ditching Palantir\u2019s \u201cconfusing to use\u201d software and switching to an in-house system.<\/p>\n The UK Statistics Authority is now investigating NHS England\u2019s use of data in promoting the benefits of Palantir\u2019s software. Even the Ministry of Defence has admitted that it is becoming \u201clocked in\u201d to Palantir\u2019s software. Two separate select committees have now called on the government to exercise a \u201cbreak clause\u201d when the FDP comes up for renewal next year.<\/p>\n Palantir is failing even its supporters\u2019 own test. As Cavendish says, what matters is what works \u2013 and it\u2019s not working. Burnham has a break clause and every reason to use it. He should not waste the chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Andy Burnham faces a lot of big decisions. But one of the incoming prime minister\u2019s biggest early tests is what he does about the world\u2019s \u201cscariest company\u201d \u2013 Palantir. The US defence and surveillance tech behemoth has a swathe of British public contracts, including, most controversially, a \u00a3330m deal with the NHS. It\u2019s pretty clear<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[336,19484,24997,10210,7729,1994,199,808],"class_list":{"0":"post-51151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-british","9":"tag-foothold","10":"tag-geoghegan","11":"tag-investigated","12":"tag-palantirs","13":"tag-peter","14":"tag-state","15":"tag-worry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}