Why Palantir Has No Place in Our NHS

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DECEMBER 10, 2025

By Cllr Claudia Turbet-Delof, Hackney Socialist Independent

Palantir Technologies is not just another tech supplier. It is a global surveillance corporation with a documented record of enabling human rights abuses — particularly against migrant communities in the United States and through militarised security partnerships internationally. Yet the UK government is attempting to embed Palantir deep inside the NHS through the Federated Data Platform (FDP), a contract worth over £300 million.

That figure alone should concern us all. But the real cost is far higher.

This is not a technical debate about data architecture. It is a moral and political choice — and one the public has an absolute right to understand, scrutinise and reject.

What is Palantir — and why should we be concerned?

Palantir is a US-based data analytics and surveillance company founded with early backing from the CIA’s venture capital arm. Its business model is built on centralising vast quantities of data, linking records across systems, and producing intelligencetools used for policing, border control, immigration enforcement and military operations.

Most notoriously, Palantir has been a central contractor for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under the Trump administration, its systems were used to identify, track and target undocumented migrants — linking workplaces, addresses and family members to enable raids and mass deportations. These practices disproportionately impacted Latino and Latin American communities, tearing families apart, spreading fear, and being cynically used to distract attention from wider atrocities carried out by the Trump administration.

In documented cases, people with legal status — even US passport holders — were wrongly detained or deported.

Palantir has never apologised for this role. On the contrary, the company has publicly boasted about its contribution to deportation programmes.

Its long-time CEO, Alex Karp, has repeatedly framed Palantir’s mission as helping the state ‘win’ against its enemies and has expressed extreme views that normalise severe punishment and state violence. This ideology matters, because it shapes who Palantir chooses to work with — and what it proudly defends.

Palantir also maintains close partnerships with the Israeli government and military, providing data analytics tools used in security and military operations.

This is the corporation now seeking to manage NHS data.

What would Palantir mean for the NHS?

Through the Federated Data Platform, the NHS is being encouraged to centralise and link huge volumes of sensitive patient data.

It is vital to be clear: the FDP is not compulsory. NHS trusts are not legally required to adopt it. This means there remains space for scrutiny, ethical leadership and refusal.

Health data are some of the most private information people share — including mental health records, disability information, safeguarding notes and data that can disproportionately expose migrant and racialised communities.

Entrusting this data to a surveillance corporation with Palantir’s track record risks destroying patient trust. If people fear that accessing healthcare could expose them or their families to monitoring, profiling or future enforcement, they will avoid services. This is not hypothetical — it is a well-documented consequence of linking data systems with enforcement infrastructure.

The NHS was founded on universality, confidentiality and care based on need, not status. Palantir threatens all three.

Hackney’s democratic challenge to Palantir

In Hackney, we have insisted this issue is debated openly and publicly.

On 14th October, the Health in Hackney Scrutiny Commission heard evidence from the Good Law Project, including Dr Nick Mann, on Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement and the danger it poses to civil liberties, migrant communities and public trust.

As a migrant woman of Latin American origin, it was extremely important to me that Hackney residents heard — in a public, accountable forum — about the deeply unethical practices of a corporation now seeking to manage their healthcare data.

I was proud to recommend Palantir and the Federated Data Platform as a scrutiny topic, ensuring that colleagues across the commission could hear the evidence first-hand. The Good Law Project are doing a brilliant job unpacking this complex — and often deliberately opaque — corporation, so communities can understand what is truly being proposed in their name.

Following that session, I raised a public question at Hackney’s November Full Council, seeking assurances about whether Palantir’s involvement in NHS data systems is compatible with Hackney’s Borough of Sanctuary commitments.

Those commitments are not symbolic. They require us to ensure that our council and partner institutions do not contribute — directly or indirectly — to hostile immigration practices or the criminalisation of vulnerable communities.

Palantir and UK GDPR

There is also a serious legal dimension. UK GDPR requires that health data — special category data — are processed lawfully, proportionately, transparently and only for clearly defined purposes.

Palantir’s systems are explicitly designed to enable large-scale data linking and secondary use. This raises the risk of function creep, where data collected for care are gradually repurposed for non-clinical objectives.

If patients cannot trust how their data are being used, then lawfulness and fairness are fundamentally undermined. Trust is not optional under GDPR — it is foundational.

Why many of us do not trust US control of health data

For many communities — particularly those with long histories of US intervention — this debate is not abstract.

I am a Latin American woman, and I carry living memory of what US-backed health and ‘development’ programmes have done to entire communities like mine. US-supported so-called population control programmes led to the forced or coerced sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of women across Latin America, with Peru alone accounting for over a quarter of a million.

These abuses were dressed up as healthcare and poverty reduction. They targeted Indigenous, Black and Brown working-class women, often girls as young as 16. This was not choice. It was coercion.

So when communities like mine are told not to worry about US surveillance corporations managing health data, we recognise the pattern: first data are collected,
 then people are categorised,  then the most vulnerable are targeted —  all while corporations make millions and human rights are violated.

As the first Latin American councillor elected in Hackney, I feel a profound responsibility to raise these voices — especially as UK governments now openly boast about expanding deportations, including from workplaces.

Ethics matter — especially in public health

As a Governor of Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, I know ethics sit at the heart of NHS governance. Boards are responsible not only for finances, but for moral accountability.

We must ask:

• Who controls our data?
  
  
  
• What else is it used for?
  
  
  
• Who is harmed by these systems?
  
  
  

Because the FDP is optional, NHS trusts can — and should — say no to unethical platforms.

Is it too late to fight back?

Absolutely not.

Across the country, people are organising to stop Palantir entering the NHS. In Hackney, residents are organising too — led by Hackney Keep Our NHS Public, alongside trade union members, community activists and the Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Together, they have formed the Hackney Coalition Against Palantir.

You can act today using the Good Law Project’s campaign tool: after entering your postcode, a template letter is sent directly to your MP.

You can also submit public questions, write to councillors and MPs, raise concerns at scrutiny commissions, or contact governors of your local NHS trust.

Silence allows contracts like this to pass unnoticed. Collective action stops them.

Final word

A £300 million NHS data contract with a corporation that profits from deportations, surveillance and human rights abuses should never be waved through quietly.

We have a right to say no to our data being handed to a company that makes millions from suffering.

Palantir is not inevitable. Surveillance is not neutral. Ethics are not negotiable.

We must choose care over control, dignity over data extraction, people over profit.

As a Latin American migrant woman, local resident and elected member, my position is clear: Palantir has no place in our NHS — not now, not ever.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Save_our_NHS_(49874977626).jpg Source: Save our NHS Author: Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

“Cynical and unethical”

DECEMBER 11,2025

Diarmaid McDonald reports on the government’s deal with pharmaceutical companies that will cost patients’ lives and worsen health outcomes.

While the UK government celebrated a deal struck with the US government to avoid tariffs on pharmaceutical exports last week, the reaction from big pharma was gleeful, with industry lobbyists said to be “salivating” over the prospect of the agreement resulting in similar profit-boosting deals with countries across Europe.

The full details of the deal are still unclear – the text has not been made public – and the UK announcement gave far fewer details of what the government has signed up to than the US or even pharma statements. But we know it is going to lead to the NHS having to spend billions more on medicines every year, and that money is going to come from its existing budget.

The deal seems to have three main commitments. A 25% increase in the NICE threshold, meaning more new drugs will be approved at higher prices, delivering less health impact per pound spent. The rebate the industry has to pay to the government when overall NHS drug spending grows faster than the rate agreed in the industry-government VPAG (Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access, and Growth) scheme will drop from over 20% to 15%. This change alone could cost the NHS over £1bn a year. And thirdly, the government has pledged the UK will double the amount we spend on patented medicines from 0.3% to 0.6% of GDP in the next ten years.

In exchange, the UK secured a pledge by the US not to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical products for three years – a permanent weakening of our price control mechanisms in exchange for a temporary waiver from tariffs that many suspected might never be implemented as they would contravene World Trade Organisation rules.

This deal should come with a huge health warning. We already spend too much on medicines – and they’re increasingly bad value for money. Prices of medicines have been growing rapidly and they will keep sky-rocketing. Diverting further funds from other parts of the NHS to further inflate their profits as the health service’s overall budget barely grows will worsen patient outcomes.

In fact, initial analysis by the health economist, Karl Claxton, estimates that if the widely reported potential £3bn annual cost of this deal is borne out, over 15,000 patients would pay for this deal with their lives every year as the move to boost industry profits strips money from other NHS care and drives up excess deaths. Doubling drug spending over ten years would see avoidable excess deaths in the hundreds of thousands. This is self-inflicted harm of pandemic proportions.

So why has the government signed a deal that so obviously threatens patients and the NHS?  The industry’s big play here was to try and extract more profits from the NHS and the UK taxpayer as pharma smelled weakness.

The NHS has long been able to secure relatively affordable prices for patented medicines because it is almost the only game in town if pharmaceutical companies want to sell in the UK market, and due to its effective price control mechanisms established to control spending on new medicines.

The pharmaceutical industry has complained about these price control mechanisms for decades.  But right now, the industry is in a uniquely fortunate position, as the UK government has pinned their political hopes on securing economic growth, making it highly vulnerable to pressure from industry announcements pledging to cancel their investments in the country. Similarly, the new NHS 10 Year Plan portrays the pharmaceutical and tech industries as the saviours of the health service, dangerously hitching the government’s wagon to their monopoly business models.

Meanwhile Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policies are being wielded in service of his widely discredited plan to bring down US drug prices. That plan is focused on forcing other countries to pay more for medicines in the mistaken belief that it will lead to big pharma voluntarily dropping prices in the US.

The amount a country pays for medicines has little bearing on pharmaceutical industry decision making on investment in research and manufacturing capacity. But pharmaceutical companies have sought to use the current political context, with high-level support from the White House,  to its advantage, in order to maximise its UK revenues and extract additional concessions from the UK government. It is cynical and unethical.

Experts suspect this sustained and seemingly coordinated campaign of threats – cancelling investment, moving their HQs out of the UK, questioning future drug supplies to the NHS – might amount to a breach of the UK’s competition laws, and we wrote with allies demanding authorities investigate. 

But with a one-dimensional understanding of economic and health policy, the UK had ruled out more creative and effective responses, meaning they left themselves little option but to roll over. So they travelled to the US to pitch their plan to please Trump. The US promptly checked with the pharma lobby to see if they were satisfied, and they in turn briefed the press. Domestic UK health policy is being decided in Washington DC by the US government and US corporations.

This deal was always about economic rather than health impact. But if the government thought the deal would see an immediate, positive response from industry they were quickly disabused of that notion. Before the deal was announced, the price the NHS pays for medicines was the key barrier to pharma investment in our economy; once it was announced, the goal posts miraculously moved. Increased drug spending was now “an important first step”. No investment announcements were made; new demands were laid out. 

We still await any evidence from the government that there will be any economic benefit resulting from the deal.

The UK was only the first step in the industry’s strategy. The focus of corporate lobbyists and industry execs immediately shifted to reload the tactics, this time targeting other European countries.

The pharmaceutical industry understood exactly what power they had and exactly what they wanted to achieve. The UK government, on the other hand, has no coherent strategy to deal with the outsized monopoly power wielded by the companies we have entrusted with the responsibility to deliver us the medicines we all rely on. As a result, an NHS under devastating financial pressure has been forced to spend money in a way that will cost patients’ lives and worsen health outcomes.

This is not just a dangerous policy development for the NHS. It’s a hugely dangerous precedent for the UK and its public services. There is no way the pharmaceutical industry won’t use this tactic again, considering how successful it has been. Other industrial sectors will have been watching and learning. 

This is not simply the consequence of a government in an impossible situation with no alternative courses of action. This is the consequence of a government which has no ideas on how to address the fundamental barriers undermining the NHS and patient health in this country, willing to sign bad deals with long term costs and no tangible benefits for a few vaguely positive headlines.

This week over 200 experts wrote to the government demanding transparency for this deal. We urgently need our parliamentarians to step up and deliver the detailed scrutiny this grave threat to patients and the NHS requires, and commit to reversing it when they get the chance. Furthermore, we urgently need them to investigate how one corporate sector was able to hold the UK hostage, and walk away with the ransom.

Diarmaid McDonald is Director of Just Treatment.  @justtreatment

Image: https://southeast.unison.org.uk/news/2025/10/hampshire-nhs-trust-transfer-to-subco-is-a-no-go/ Creator: rawpixel.com | Credit: rawpixel.com. Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal CC0 1.0 Deed