Experts Warn Palantir's NHS Data Platform Could Become a Surveillance Tool —
Even If the Company Is Removed

Technologists and civil liberties campaigners have warned that NHS England's Federated Data Platform (FDP) — built and run largely by the US firm Palantir — creates a surveillance risk that would outlast the company's involvement, even if a future government decided to cut ties with it.

Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project told openDemocracy that Palantir's experience linking together disparate government datasets in the US had already enabled detailed profiling used in immigration enforcement raids there, and warned the same capability was now being built into the UK's public sector.

The concern is sharpened by a lack of clarity around what data the platform holds. Nearly three years after Palantir won the £330 million FDP contract, the exact scope of what patient information it processes — and under what legal authority — remains unclear, even though around seven in ten NHS regional trusts have already adopted the system. That opacity was underlined recently when a cross-party parliamentary committee, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, called on the government to end its contract with Palantir and demanded clarity on the legal basis for its access to identifiable patient data.

Yet some who helped build the platform argue that removing Palantir wouldn't solve the underlying problem. NHS technologist Tom Bartlett, who worked on the FDP and remains a supporter of the project, said the deeper risk is political rather than technical: a future government could still choose to link NHS and Home Office data for purposes such as denying care or facilitating deportations, regardless of which vendor built the system.

A broadening backlash
Opposition to the platform now extends well beyond the NHS. Doctors' union the British Medical Association has urged GPs not to adopt it. Greater Manchester's Integrated Care Board, which serves 2.8 million people, has refused to sign up, citing unresolved security concerns and confidence in its own in-house data systems. London's mayor has blocked a separate £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police over concerns it was improperly awarded, and Coventry unions and councillors are contesting a £750,000 renewal of the company's contract with the council's children's services department. Financial Conduct Authority staff are meanwhile organising against a 12-week trial contract, fearing it could expose sensitive financial data to US authorities.

Both the Met and the FCA defended their arrangements with Palantir when approached, saying data access was tightly controlled and subject to internal authorisation. Coventry council did not respond to questions.

What the FDP actually does
Palantir's pitch to the NHS is that it can unify patient information currently scattered across an estimated 44,000 separate IT systems spanning 26,000 organisations. According to Bartlett, the platform functions as a kind of operating system on which NHS trusts and outside developers can build tools — for instance, letting ambulance crews send information ahead to hospital A&E departments before a patient arrives.

But that integration comes with what technologists call "vendor lock-in": the more of the NHS that adopts Palantir's system, the harder it becomes to leave. Documentation reviewed by openDemocracy shows the platform is already drawing on hundreds of separate databases covering categories including mental health contacts, vaccination records, mortality data, ethnicity, and information on people held in secure psychiatric units, prisons and immigration removal centres.

There is also continuing confusion over whether GP records are included. In 2023, then-health minister Victoria Atkins told the Commons that GP data would not form part of the national platform. An NHS FAQ page updated in April 2026, however, acknowledges that some data in the FDP may originate from GP records shared with hospital trusts that use the system.

Central to the platform is a tool NHS documentation calls the "Person Ontology" — a system that assigns each patient a unique identifier and cross-references their activity across multiple linked databases. NHS England says this data is pseudonymised rather than identifiable, but the UK's data protection regulator, the ICO, has cautioned that pseudonymisation — unlike true anonymisation — is a reversible process.

The surveillance question
Because Palantir also holds UK policing contracts, critics argue the technical barriers separating health and law-enforcement data are ultimately just legal ones, and legal safeguards can change. Palantir's UK chief executive, Louis Mosley, has previously said the company would comply with government policy if a future administration — citing Reform UK's stated immigration enforcement plans as an example — sought to use NHS data for immigration enforcement purposes.

Junior doctor Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, who campaigns against Palantir's NHS role with the group Medact, said Reform's proposed immigration policy explicitly envisions mining health, police and financial data together, and that Palantir's own UK leadership has indicated it would not resist such a request.

Even Bartlett, who supports the FDP, acknowledged the scenario was a legitimate worry, but questioned whether the answer was to leave NHS data too fragmented to be useful for any purpose, good or bad.

Is a single vendor even necessary?
Some critics reject the premise that only a company like Palantir can solve the NHS's data fragmentation problem. Sam Smith of patient-rights group medConfidential argued that nothing Palantir does is technically unique — other providers could do the same work — and that the company's advantage lies more in its reputation than its technology. A cross-party committee separately heard evidence from health-software entrepreneur Andrew Holway that large, multi-year contracts with vendors like Palantir represent one of the biggest obstacles to NHS innovation, potentially locking out cheaper or more efficient alternatives.

Manchester's Integrated Care Board has taken a different path, opting to build and use its own analytics platform instead of the FDP. Its chief data and analytics officer, Matt Hennessey, has written publicly that public trust is central to the platform's success or failure — arguing that when patients and clinicians don't understand or trust a data system, they disengage from it, opt out, or become reluctant to participate.

Palantir, NHS England, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care and Reform UK did not respond to openDemocracy's requests for comment.

 

Source: Based on reporting by Jade-Ruyu Yan and Aman Sethi for openDemocracy: "Palantir is turning the NHS into a tool for mass surveillance," openDemocracy, 5 June 2026 (updated 17 June 2026).