Palantir is saving the NHS. So why does the Left want it gone?

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Can you imagine anything worse than a foreign company whose software saved lives, cut NHS waiting lists, put more police on the beat and reduced crime?

It’s appalling, isn’t it? No British government or public sector body should have any dealings with such a company. Obviously.

Much better to let patients die, cut police jobs and see crime rise. Those, we can all agree, represent British values and no foreign company should be allowed to destroy them.

That’s a rough summary of the ‘debate’ – the noise doesn’t really merit such a label – surrounding the involvement of US data management company Palantir in the NHS and the police.

Palantir’s technology is light years ahead of any other in its ability to transform how data is collated and analysed – and as a result to introduce unprecedented benefits to public service users through new efficiencies. If Britain were a sane country, politicians of all stripes would be lining up to see what further benefits could be delivered from the increased use of Palantir’s software.

But we are far from sane. Instead of thanking our lucky stars that Palantir exists and that we have secured deals to use its software and services, Palantir has become the latest bogeyman for the Left. Labour MPs queue up to denounce the company – and not just those from the Hard Left, such Richard Burgon, who last week demanded at Prime Minister’s Questions that Palantir’s contract with the NHS be halted. The Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, has joined in, vetoing a £50 million deal with the Metropolitan Police. Even the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee has denounced the use of Palantir as an ‘unacceptable point of weakness’ and demanded the Government trigger the 2027 break clause on Palantir’s NHS data contract. Khan, meanwhile, says Londoners only want to see public money being paid to companies that ‘share the values of our city’ – although his veto is supposedly based on flaws in the procurement process.

The evidence of the benefits Palantir brings is overwhelming. For decades the use of data within the NHS has been a disaster. There are stories of hospitals having to juggle dozens, even hundreds, of conflicting pieces of software and resorting to paper and pen. In the past two decades alone, the NHS has wasted tens of billions of pounds on data management, such as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). Originally estimated at £2.3 billion, the total cost ballooned to £9.8 billion by the time the Department of Health reported its final cost in 2013, with some estimates of the overall cost reaching £12.7 billion once contract overruns were included. The benefits were almost non-existent and the Public Accounts Committee called it ‘one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector.’ That is just one example.

In 2023, a £330m contract to build the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) was agreed with Palantir. At a stroke it transformed the collation of data and has already generated faster cancer diagnoses, increases in operating theatre use and fewer delays discharging patients. Since the seven year contract began in 2024, it has so far led to 110,078 extra operations. 

By integrating hospital records with social care, delayed discharges have been reduced by 15.3%. Waiting lists have been reduced by 797,728 patients. For hospitals in the NHS Cancer 360 trial there has been a minimum 6.8% improvement in the number of patients diagnosed or given the all-clear within 28 days. In one NHS Trust that figure is 13.2%. If this was rolled out across the NHS, the target for over 80% of cancer patients to be diagnosed within 28 days of a referral would be easily surpassed – a target the NHS has never met.

As for the decision to bar the police from working with Palantir to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has been clear that the force will no longer be able to avoid the planned job cuts for front line police: ‘I’ve had to reduce by 3,300 people in the last three years. We’ve got to reduce by another 1,150 this year ahead. We were going to be using technology as a big part of that to automate some of our bureaucratic processes, so the cuts we make would not affect front-line policing. 

‘Also that technology would have given faster analytics to help officers investigating crime, so we could do better on the streets, as well as saving money… So we’re going to be reducing front-line services and officers won’t, in the near future, be getting the sophisticated technologies to help them fight crime we hoped for.’

Given the huge and obvious benefits Palantir brings, you will doubtless wonder what lies behind this hatred of the company. One of the company’s most vociferous critics is – of course he is – Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens. Polanski complains that Palantir’s CEO in Europe ‘insists on wearing a black shirt every time he is on TV’ – presumably a dig at Louis Mosley’s grandfather, Oswald. But for most of Palantir’s enemies, it is not its CEO’s choice of clothing which is the real problem but something far more insidious – and increasingly common. It is that Palantir has contracts in Israel, including one with its Ministry of Defence.

The fact that this is a minuscule proportion of Palantir’s business (reported to be in the low tens of millions of dollars a year, compared with Palantir’s overall worldwide revenue of billions of dollars) and barely even makes it a significant defence supplier to Israel is irrelevant. Palantir is involved in Israel and, as such, is toxic to a mindset that increasingly dominates the Left.

Deal with Palantir and we infect ourselves with the Jewish state. Expunge Palantir from our island and we start the process of expunging the Jewish state. As for cancer victims and patients waiting for an operation or diagnosis – or the victims of crime… so what? The fight against Israel is all that matters.

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