The British government has put its most contentious health-tech contract on notice. It is now formally reviewing the NHS's £330mn deal with Palantir, and weighing whether to walk away in 2027.
Technology minister Liz Kendall confirmed the review this week, telling Times Radio that “the current health secretary is reviewing every single aspect of that contract to make sure we get the right deal for Britain,” according to Reuters. The question on the table is whether to trigger a break clause at the end of the deal's initial term in 2027.
Palantir won the contract in November 2023, under the previous Conservative government, to build the NHS Federated Data Platform, a system meant to connect patient data across NHS England and support clinical decisions. It has been contested almost ever since, over how it was awarded, how patient data is handled, and how much of the country's health infrastructure now rests on a single American supplier.
The review follows a Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report that singled out Palantir's growing presence in the UK public sector as “an unacceptable point of weakness” and urged ministers to consider the break clause. MPs have pointed to data-security concerns and to Palantir's work on US defence and immigration enforcement as reasons to reduce the NHS's dependence on it.
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It also lands after reports that the NHS could grant Palantir personnel and other external staff broad access to identifiable patient data on part of the platform, which prompted the National Data Guardian to seek answers and fuelled a patient campaign under the banner “Not With My NHS Data.”
The Financial Times has separately reported that a senior figure at a UK health advisory body advised one of Palantir's partners while it was bidding for the work.
Palantir has pushed back hard. Its software “can only be used to process data precisely in line with the instruction of the customer,” the company said, arguing that using it for anything else would be “illegal” and “technically impossible due to granular access controls overseen by the NHS.” Its UK leadership has urged ministers not to “give in to ideologically motivated campaigners.”
Strip away the specifics and this is a story about dependence. It sits inside a wider European reckoning over reliance on US firms for critical infrastructure, from cloud to AI to health data, that has become a recurring political risk rather than a purely technical one. With the NHS, the data is uniquely sensitive, the supplier is American, and the politics are radioactive.
A review, though, is not a cancellation. The break clause is not until 2027, the government has not committed to using it, and unwinding a platform now woven through NHS England would be expensive and disruptive, with Palantir's UK ambitions and its market standing partly riding on contracts like this.
Kendall's “right deal for Britain” is doing a lot of work; it signals a government hunting for leverage and political cover as much as for an exit. But for the first time, ending the NHS's most controversial software contract is officially on the table, and that alone reframes the question of who gets to hold the country's health data.