UK Ministers are checking if there is a way out of Palantir’s NHS stint.
UK officials have been asking lawyers and tech bods how to trigger a break clause in Palantir’s contract, as pressure builds to boot the controversial US outfit out of NHS England data systems.
According to Wise, the firm, run by the anti-Christ-hunting Peter Thiel, landed a seven-year £330mn (€380mn) deal in 2023 to build a platform to consolidate waiting lists, patient records, and other sensitive health data.
Palantir’s presence has become a rolling headache, thanks to its links to the US defence world and to Palantir co-founder and chief executive Alex Karp’s loud support for Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
MPs, NHS staff, and medical trade unions have been muttering that Palantir is a rotten fit for handling data across a national health system.
People close to the talks said officials believe it would be possible to hand the Federated Data Platform, which Palantir is contracted to build, to another supplier.
They have started quietly poking at the technical steps needed to prise Palantir’s kit out of NHS systems, well ahead of any decision to use the original break clause in 2027.
A senior government figure said: “We are confident we could do it if we wanted to,” while stressing the exercise was not driven by specific unhappiness with Palantir.
Another health official said: “We had a look internally about whether we could trigger the break clause and what it would look like.”
The FDP hoovers up operational NHS data, including waiting lists, staffing, patient health and treatment details, plus theatre schedules, so any swap-out is not a weekend job.
The same senior government figure admitted some hospital trusts have been slow to adopt Palantir’s software because they simply do not find it useful.
They said the health department has kept leaning on hospitals to use it anyway, partly to squeeze value from what has already been paid to the company.
The latest annual report from the Treasury’s National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, known as Nista, puts the programme’s whole-life cost at more than £1bn (€1.15bn).
Nista has handed the project its top “green rating” for delivery on time and on budget, which is brave talk for anything that touches NHS IT.
If the break clause is invoked, it would occur before an independent evaluation of the FDP by Imperial College Projects, a review scheduled to run for up to three years.
NHS figures show that 123 of 205 hospital trusts are using the FDP, with 80 “reporting benefits” at the end of February 2026. Another 45 trusts have “signed up” to the platform.
NHS officials told the FT that only some of those organisations use the FDP day-to-day, whether partially or in full, which is a polite way of saying the login screen does not get much love.
Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said skipping the break clause would be “a massive mistake” and “the government needs to procure a new consortium of UK tech experts to build a modular platform to benefit the NHS for years to come”.
Labour MP Clive Lewis added: “It’s a no-brainer, it should be activated. This break clause is an exit ramp, and the government should take it.”
Critics within the health service say the larger, more digitally capable hospitals often reckon that Palantir’s platform adds little compared with what they run in-house.
A senior person in the health service said: “There was a demonstration for hospital chief executives and half said, ‘oh my God, this is amazing, it’s going to change everything’, and the other half said ‘we’ve been doing this for 10 years,”.
Palantir UK head of health partnerships Stephen Childs said: “Our software is helping to deliver better patient care — including 110,000 additional operations, a 15 per cent reduction in discharge delays, almost 800,000 patients removed from waiting lists and a 6.8 per cent increase in the number of patients finding out whether they have cancer within 28 days of referral.”
A Department for Health spokesperson said: “The NHS Federated Data Platform is helping to join up patient care, increase productivity, speed up cancer diagnosis and ensure thousands of additional patients can be treated each month — with strict requirements in place about data security and confidentiality.
“Every hospital trust and integrated care board has their own instance of the IT platform, with complete control over who has access.” the spokesperson said.
