UK: Govt Pressures NHS Institutions to Adopt Palantir Plan

The British government continues to push National Health Service (NHS) institutions to implement a contract with Palantir – a US tech firm complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in ongoing ICE violence in the United States – despite risks to data protection, health sovereignty, and access to care. A discussion coordinated by the Peace and Justice Project on Tuesday, January 20, brought together researchers, activists, and health workers to examine the likely consequences of the plan.

The issue is not new to activists: many local initiatives have already opposed the NHS becoming reliant on Palantir products. Yet speakers emphasized that broader engagement is now essential. Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project stressed that patients, health workers, and policymakers alike must understand that the deal has “real impacts on NHS functioning.” “It’s not just esoteric concerns,” he said.

Researchers Anne Alexander and Matt Mahmoudi outlined Palantir’s long record of involvement in human rights violations and warned about risks of this legacy being imported into the NHS. “In April 2025, Palantir secured a USD 30 million contract with ICE,” Mahmoudi noted. “We know that these tools that are being used in the US, and now sold on towards the UK, are also being used to contract with the Israeli military – specifically for things like targeting acquisition and combat information – and end up harming and leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”

“To imagine this sort of company having any kind of footprint in the health sector here in the UK is absolutely atrocious and should make us shiver in our seats,” he added.

Government officials have attempted to reassure patients and staff that safeguards would prevent misuse of NHS data, claiming that data would be anonymized or pseudonymized. McCann warned, however, that such assurances can be misleading. “The nature of health data is that it’s so personal that it’s actually very difficult to fully anonymize or pseudonymize,” he explained.

Alexander, Mahmoudi, and McCann also described previous examples of Palantir’s business strategy: offering new users initial access at minimal cost, then raising prices while locking them into dependence by retaining intellectual property rights and limiting compatibility with other systems. Governments and public services, Alexander noted, are a favored target under this strategy. What Palantir effectively sells them, she suggested, is a promise of order in the “chaos created by decades of marketization.”

Years of commodification have left Britain’s health services operating through a number of incompatible data systems. A unified health data platform – not unlike the Federated Data Platform envisioned under the Palantir deal – could significantly improve care planning and delivery. But participants agreed that any such platform must be publicly developed, publicly owned, and publicly accountable. The technical – and financial, seeing that Palantir is set to receive hundreds of millions pounds for the project – capacity to do this already exists, McCann and Linnéa Freear of Health Workers for a Free Palestine and No Palantir in the NHS stressed. Some health bodies, including in the Greater Manchester region, have rejected the Palantir deal, arguing that existing, locally built systems already offer better functionalities.

Palantir exemplifies the dangers privatization poses to NHS

While more than 100 trusts have formally signed onto the plan, roughly a third of NHS trusts in England have yet to decide, McCann added. Even among those that agreed, he suggested, many have already engaged in passive resistance – essentially showing that they “said yes to get the government off their backs, but they’re not really keen to use it,” he said.

“The contract with Palantir only works if hospitals and integrated care boards adopt it at the local level,” Freear added. “That means it can only succeed with patient and staff trust.” Such trust is notably missing: available information indicates that a significant proportion of patients would opt out of data sharing for health research if Palantir was involved.

Public unease has translated into growing resistance to the deal. Existing initiatives include the Hackney Coalition Against Palantir, represented at the panel by George Binette, and Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition, whose activist Shirley Franklin moderated the discussion. Speakers called for scaling up the organizing, particularly through more trade union involvement and more convergence across movements.

Lucy Nichols of Keep Our NHS Public highlighted that Palantir’s record of rights violations in this case overlaps with wider issues of privatization. “Palantir exemplifies quite clearly the dangers that privatization poses to the NHS,” she said, “but it also exemplifies some of the broader attacks on the NHS as a publicly provided, accountable, and funded service.”

“There’s also the fact that the people in charge of Palantir are incredibly right-wing; the UK head is called Louis Mosley – yes, the grandson of Oswald Mosley is in charge of Palantir in the UK, and I think that says a lot about the kind of company this is,” she added. “We would all be safer if no company were allowed to make a profit from the NHS,” she concluded.

Her remarks were echoed by MP Jeremy Corbyn, who argued that the campaign against Palantir should also be used to advance the case for a “publicly owned, publicly run, and free-at-the-point-of-need” health system. “The campaign against Palantir will unlock the imagination of so many people to realize just how dangerous the whole privatization agenda has been for our NHS,” Corbyn concluded.

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch