The Wrong Choice for Our NHS
Why Palantir is the wrong choice for the NHS
For the past 18 months I have been urging the Government to break the Palantir FDP NHS contract, and indeed, to keep Palantir out of all public contracts.
The NHS have a £330 million contract with Palantir for their Federated Data Platform, intended to deliver AI insights into the NHS, and to connect all 200-odd hospital trusts to a data warehouse for the purpose of analysis. In recent days however, the Government has increased the projected costs of this contract to £1.1 billion.
My objection to Palantir is that they are the wrong supplier, with the wrong contract and the wrong software. I agree that the NHS needs a software solution to streamline services and improve data connectivity, but this is not something that Palantir is capable of delivering. Any software should be fully owned and under the full control of the UK, and crucially, it needs to be trusted.
Palantir was initially funded by the CIA as a defence contractor. Their stated aim is to become the default operating system for data decisions across government departments in the US, and now the UK too. Their UK CEO Louis Mosely even recommended that the UK Government develop a common operating system to combine healthcare and government data. This shows how casually Palantir are treating sensitive data.
Palantir offer software as a service. The initial contract cost the NHS £330 million, which is essentially a rental payment. The NHS does not own the software. If the NHS does not renew, it loses the software, and potentially all the data housed within the software.
When looking at a new software system in the NHS, you would think the first thing you’d want to do is let your GP see your hospital records, and vice versa. But no, Palantir’s FDP cannot and will not allow this type of data connectivity. That is a severe oversight and a huge limitation of the software.
Palantir’s NHS Federated Data Platform was meant to deliver 13 core capabilities. According to the national audit office and the supplier themselves, after three years, they have partially delivered three or four of them.
Palantir’s previous UK contracts are no improvement. In Autumn 2020, Palantir won a £20 million contract for a border-flow system. After a year or two this was cancelled as it had no users and no useful function.
Recently, we have seen that NHS England plans to change how it evaluates Palantir’s success after staff highlighted flaws in the analysis. Additionally, in the last few days, the Government has increased the projected costs to £1.1bn, meanwhile forecast benefits fell to £808m.
It is for reasons such as these that I have concerns about Palantir’s place in our NHS, and indeed in any public contract. It is also why I, along with a growing number of MPs, have been urging the Government to break this contract for the past year.
It has also become evident over the past 12 months that there was an astonishing lack of scrutiny given to this contract from the outset, including a lack of information about the initial meeting between Boris Johnson, Peter Thiel and Dominic Cummings. The more that this is investigated, the lack of transparency and any documentation about this meeting is worrying.
What is fundamental to a system such as this, is trust. We trust that our emails send to the right person, we trust our data is secure. Gaining public trust for AI is already hard enough. We have the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reporting that Palantir trials have been exaggerated and untrue. They have said that there is potential for an FDP to transform how care is delivered within the nHS and wider health services, but it should be via a UK-owned platform with full confidence from patients and professionals.
There are plenty of alternative, and crucially, sovereign, options that would deliver a similar, and arguably better solution as Palantir without the concerns that I have. An example of this is already operating in Greater Manchester NHS.
I will continue to urge the Government to seek and employ alternatives as the existing contract approaches its renewal point at the start of next year. By signing my petition, it will help me put pressure on the Government in this matter.
