NHS staff blockade the entrance to NHS England’s headquarters in central London demanding the cancellation of its contract with Palantir, which supplies advanced technology to Israel’s military, April 3, 2024
ANDY BURNHAM is not “minded” to grant contracts to CIA-linked tech firm Palantir, we learn from Westminster briefings this week.
The Makerfield MP’s impending coronation leaves us in a strange transitional period where his reported preferences are the stuff of gossip, rather than policies being demanded as the price of support. He has delivered a pitch to the nation of sorts: but no questions were taken, and pinning the PM-to-be down is much harder in the absence of a leadership contest.
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[T]reating Burnham’s premiership as a foregone conclusion allows him to be troublingly vague.
His allies can reassure the left that he isn’t keen on Palantir, citing his record as Manchester mayor in which role he never awarded it a contract; he himself avoids any specific commitments either on future contracts or — significantly — existing ones.
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Thiel is a plutocrat as sinister as Elon Musk, with whom he shares an upbringing in apartheid South Africa: an advocate of “post-democracy,” arguing that democracy is incompatible with human (by which he largely means corporate) freedom and, also like Musk, pitching his own tech companies as future mechanisms of rule.
Palantir’s facilitation of horrific racist policing methods in the US, and still more horrific war crimes by the Israeli military, is well known but cancelling its contracts is not simply a question of ethics.
We have to question the idea that companies as powerful as this provide services on a politically neutral basis, given their founders are explicitly hostile to public services as such.
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It’s good that Burnham is not “minded” to favour Palantir, but a comprehensive rejection of outsourcing policies which now threaten democracy itself is what’s required.
There are competing narratives on Burnham’s approach to Palantir. Apart from or possibly above anything else, reports that Palantir’s system has apalling performance even after optimisation should be adequate and sufficient to abandon Palantir in the NHS.
Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting – who recently resigned as health secretary – has said that Palantir is “absolutely critical to the future of the NHS.”
But a briefing prepared for NHS England senior leaders in February said that Palantir’s NHS platform is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool in use.
“Processing time is reported as taking 4-5 minutes compared to 30 seconds [in the current system]” the briefing states, even after making “optimisation” changes to speed it up.
Palantir is benefiting from millions of pounds of tax deductions that allow it to pay very little corporate tax in the United Kingdom despite soaring profits, an investigation by openDemocracy reveals.
The controversial tech firm has won at least £670m in UK public contracts in recent years, which have helped to make the country its second-largest market by revenue after the United States, where it is headquartered. Yet despite accounting for 10% of the company’s global revenue last year, its tax payments in the UK amounted to less than 5% of its total global cash tax spend, according to US filings.
The filings suggest Palantir’s UK subsidiary paid less than $1.08m (£820,000) in cash tax in the UK in 2025 – less than it paidin Korea, Japan, France and Germany – after accumulating tax deductions due to stock prices. Palantir’s stock has surged since the company went public in 2020, peaking in 2025 before paring back gains this year.
In 2024, Palantir’s UK subsidiary reported pre-tax profits of £25.3m, but assessed its local corporate tax requirement as only around £2m, according to the latest accounts filed with Companies House. This puts its annual corporate tax rate at roughly 8% – far lower than the 25% usually paid by businesses with profits over £250,000 in the UK.
In 2023, the company’s tax rate was lower still, at 4.7% on pre-tax profits of approximately £19.1m, and in 2022 it was 4.2% on pre-tax profits of around £19.9m. Its UK accounts are not yet available for 2025 onwards. Taken together, that’s just £3.7m of tax on £63.4m in cumulative pre-tax profits over three years.
openDemocracy analysed hundreds of pages of Palantir’s filings in the US and the UK from 2020 to 2025, a period when the company recorded extraordinary growth in revenue and profits. We found the company’s low tax exposure was down to two factors: A structured arrangement that limits the profits recognised in the UK, and a provision in the UK tax code that rewards companies with significant tax breaks in return for compensating their employees with stock rather than in cash.
This strategy, experts say, is legal and very effective. In 2020, the company had already accumulated £32m in tax breaks in the UK, according to Companies House, of which about £26m were due to what the company called “employee share acquisition relief”. Two years later, the total size of the UK tax break had ballooned sevenfold to $303.4m (approximately £230m) in net operating losses in the UK, which its parent company said “can be carried forward indefinitely” in its 2022 annual filings in the US.
The nature of annual filings makes it hard to assess the current size of Palantir’s accumulated tax deductions, but it is clear that the company’s tax deductions in the UK have grown much faster than its profits. The most recent Companies House accounts suggest the company gained about £92m in tax deductions in 2024 alone, of which it used a small portion to reduce its tax assessment for the year from £6.3m at the standard rate of 25% to only about £2m on pre-tax profits of £25.3m.
“When profitable companies are paying very little tax, especially when much of their revenues derive from taxpayers’ money itself, then it’s important to ask why,” said Mike Lewis, the director of TaxWatch. “Is it because tax incentives and tax breaks are poorly targeted? Or is it because companies are shifting profits in ways that our tax system is supposed to counteract?”
In Palantir’s case, the company’s surging stock price created deductions at a scale that would lower its tax burden even if the company recognised more profits in the UK.
The company is far from the only tech firm to have reduced its UK tax burden in this way. Fair-tax proponents have called for the UK to do a better job of taxing tech companies since Meta (then known as Facebook) provoked outrage for paying only £4,327 in corporate taxes in 2014, after paying more than £35m to staff in a share bonus scheme.
“It’s a consistent pattern,” said Nathan Goldman, professor of accounting at North Carolina State University, whose work focuses on corporate taxation. “All of these companies are following the same pattern. They’re not doing anything illegal.”
Goldman said that while there are “lots of knobs you can turn” to get deductions, share-based compensation for employees is the one that can yield significant gains in cases where stock prices rise sharply in a short period of time.
Yet, Palantir’s critics say its case stands out because much of its revenue derives from public sector contracts, including the cash-strapped National Health Service. As openDemocracy revealed back in 2020, Palantir’s work with the NHS went from a £1 contract to £1m. The company’s current NHS contract is worth at least £330M.
“If these findings are accurate, they expose the staggering extent to which Palantir is taking from our country while giving back as little as possible,” said Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali.
“It has pocketed hundreds of millions of pounds in public contracts, yet appears to have paid an effective tax rate that is a fraction of that paid by the doctors, nurses and other public sector workers who keep our services going. Greens have said before that Palantir should pack its bags and get the hell out of our NHS. What will it take for this Labour government to finally show them the door?”
“At a time we are asking for more scrutiny into the Federated Data Platform contract, it is mindboggling that Palantir are siphoning millions of pounds out of the UK,” said Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley, who has been a vocal opponent of the UK government’s work with Palantir. “Our NHS needs to be working with trusted suppliers, and Palantir seem to be consistently undermining that trust. It’s time the government gets serious and builds the offramp.”
“Multinationals like Palantir are able to exploit the defects in current international tax rules to pay lower effective tax rates overall,” said Sol Picciotto, an emeritus professor at Lancaster University and senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network. “This is particularly problematic for those providing services which can be delivered globally, giving them great freedom to decide where and how to declare taxable profits.”
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“Palantir is paying little or no corporate income tax in both the US and the UK, despite its bread and butter being government contracts,” said Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation. He called the strategy “textbook Silicon Valley profit-shifting” and added that the “generous corporate tax treatment” of these types of share-based payments is “in play on both sides of the Atlantic”.
“Whilst Palantir’s share price grows, these are likely to continue to depress the company’s effective tax rate.”
“It is therefore re-assuring to see an indication in the US parent’s financial statements that they are the subject of a live inquiry by HMRC that encompasses the last two years,” he said, referring to a note in the company’s US annual filing for 2025, which reads that the “Company is subject to potential examination by tax authorities” in “the UK for tax years 2024 through 2025.”
“We do not comment on the tax affairs of individual taxpayers,” said a spokesperson for HMRC, the government department responsible for the collection of taxes. “These are long‑standing rules set by Parliament, and we enforce them rigorously to make sure every company pays the tax that is due under UK law.”
openDemocracy has reached out to Palantir for comment, but had not heard back at time of publication. This story will be updated if the company responds.
Behind the shield
Business leaders insist that the UK’s corporate tax regime stifles investment and cripples economic growth. In 2021, when then-chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that corporate taxes would rise from 19% to 25%, The Times carried an article headlined “Companies ‘will quit UK’ over Sunak’s corporation tax rise”.
Yet an examination of Palantir’s accounts reveals that the UK’s corporate tax regime allows fast-growing technology companies to harvest millions of pounds in tax breaks by richly remunerating their employees with stock options.
Compensating employees in this manner, said Goldman the accounting professor, creates “incentive alignment”, where employees have a stake in the success of the company – improving employee retention rates – as well as allowing companies to preserve cash (as offering stock options doesn’t impact cash flows), and generating future tax deductions if, and only if, the company succeeds.
But if a company succeeds like Palantir, he added, the tax deductions generated in this manner are very large.
The key to this mechanism lies in Part 12 of the Corporation Tax Act 2009, which allows a company to claim a tax deduction relief equivalent to the difference between the market price of the stock at the point at which they are acquired by the employee and the original strike price paid by the employee.
“UK tax policy allows qualifying companies these kinds of deductions,” said Dr Federica Casano, lecturer in business and tax law at the University of Leeds. “The relief under Part 12 of CTA 2009 is broadly neutral as to the type of instrument – restricted or unrestricted shares, options or RSUs [Restricted Stock Units].”
In Palantir’s case, the stock has soared by over 1,000% since the company went public in September 2020, thereby creating hundreds of millions of pounds of tax deductions in the UK as the company’s employees have cashed in.
In 2024, the company’s stock price closed the year at about $77. That year, the accounts reveal, the company generated about £92m in tax deductions. The following year, the stock peaked at $207.52 in November 2025, before paring back its gains, suggesting the company would have harvested a fresh round of multi-million-pound tax deductions for that year. At the time of publishing, the stock is priced at about $107.
“The corporation tax deduction available in the UK is among the more generous. Stock-based compensation is supposed to reduce payroll pressure on cash flow, especially for start-ups,” said Lewis from Tax Watch.
“The fact that it is also available to established, profit-making companies means that it can effectively wipe out very profitable companies’ tax bills for years if share values significantly increase. In an era of almost historically unprecedented tech stock valuations, it may be time to look at restricting the deduction.”
Wittgenstein’s tax rules
Around the world, governments have long struggled to get corporations to pay more tax in their respective countries. Raise taxes in one jurisdiction, the argument goes, and companies will simply restructure to recognise profits elsewhere.
In 2021, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sought to prevent a race to the bottom by establishing a global minimum tax rate of 15%, often referred to as a ‘top-up’ tax. In January 2025, as these rules were being rolled out across the world, the Trump administration not only withdrew from the agreement, but announced it would sanction countries that sought to tax US companies under the framework. Since then, the G7 has struck an uneasy carve-out for the US, the implications of which are still unclear.
Even so, the UK remains an outlier, both in how it taxes multinational Big Tech companies and also in its willingness to contract out vital public services to these companies.
“The case of Palantir clearly shows the defects of these rules, and also highlights the failure to resolve them over the past 13 years through the OECD,” said Lancaster professor Picciotto. “That’s why developing countries launched negotiations for a global tax treaty through the UN. The UK should strongly support this initiative to ensure that multinationals can be taxed where they have real activities, including revenues.”
“It’s notable that the UK government has just agreed, at the behest of the Trump administration, to exempt US-headquartered companies from one key defence against such profit-shifting: the global minimum ‘top-up’ tax,” Lewis said, adding that the Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that this will cost the UK at least £700m in tax revenues every year.
Palantir’s UK subsidiary had to pay this ‘top-up’ tax last year on low-taxed profits within the group, in the most recent year, Lewis noted. “It may not have to in the future. That’s an example of how the UK’s acquiescence to the White House puts UK firms at a disadvantage compared to their US competitors, and costs us much-needed tax revenues.”
Governments in several of Palantir’s other key overseas markets – none of which is as large as the UK – are already distancing themselves from the company. France and Germany have announced they are moving away from Palantir’s products, while the company’s work in Korea remains largely commercial as part of an alliance with the Hyundai group.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Palantir continues to work with government bodies, causing public outcry. And the company’s leadership remains bullish on its prospects and profitability. In a letter to investors in May this year, CEO Alex Karp noted the company had generated $871m in profits on $1.6bn in revenue in the first three months of 2026 alone.
“Our quarterly profit – the largest in our company’s twenty-three-year history – has more than quadrupled in only twelve months,” Karp wrote. “What business in the world, at this scale, has ever accomplished anything of the sort?”
Karp began his letter to shareholders with an enigmatic quote from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen: “And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.”
Campaigners rally against Palantir. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
DOZENS of campaigners rallied outside the year’s biggest NHS conference today to demand health chiefs and the government pull the plug on US surveillance tech firm Palantir.
The NHSConfedExpo, organised by the NHS Alliance, brings together health policy-makers from around the country, but has in recent times been a target for protest by those concerned at the encroachment of the US-based data analytics firm on the service.
Palantir has been implicated in genocide as a supplier of AI technologies for battlefield decision-making and the creation of target lists to the IDF as it set about its slaughter of over 75,000 civilians, an estimated 22,000 of them children, and as many as 1,700 health workers in Gaza.
Speakers at the rally included representatives of Unison, Amnesty International, the Good Law Project, Young Struggle Manchester, and Angela, who did not give her surname, from local mental health campaign CHARM, which last year joined demands for Manchester’s Integrated Joint Board to drop the firm.
“As an organisation of service users, survivors, carers, trade unionists and allies, we believe this is about far more than technology,” she said.
“It’s about trust. That is not a minor issue. In mental healthcare, trust can be lifesaving.
“Healthcare data should be protected by organisations that reflect the stated values of the NHS. These values include care, transparency, accountability and respect for human rights.
Khan said there had been a breach of procurement rules in the contract and suggested Palantir had been the only contender.
Now the Times has reported that Palantir’s lawyers have written to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime saying they intend to challenge the decision in court. Khan’s office confirmed they had received the letter. Palantir declined to comment for this article.
A spokesperson for Khan’s office said: “The Met did not present its procurement strategy as required and the Met only fully engaged with one potential supplier: Palantir.”
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On Tuesday morning, the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, confirmed the government was conducting a full review of the NHS contract with Palantir, assessing whether to extend the £330m deal or activate a break clause that would allow it to stop using the company’s services in early 2027.
Last week, a parliamentary committee urged the government to trigger a break, calling Palantir’s presence an “unacceptable point of weakness” in a public sector increasingly reliant on a handful of US tech firms.
Kicking out Palantir, experts warn, may not solve the problems its Federated Data Platform has created.
NHS England’s Federated Data Platform, run primarily by controversial US military contractor Palantir, would give a future UK government the ability to use patients’ healthcare data to unleash unprecedented mass surveillance, experts and technologists have warned openDemocracy.
“We have already seen in the US how Palantir’s reach into so many different areas of government has allowed it to build a system that provides detailed profiles of people to enable ICE raids,” said Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project, referring to how President Donald Trump’s mass deportation programme has used Palantir’s tools. “The exact same thing is being enabled by the integration of Palantir into the UK public sector.”
This risk is only exacerbated by the fact that nearly three years after Palantir was awarded the £330m contract to run the FDP, it remains unclear what patient data it gathers, on what basis and to what end. Despite this, 69% of regional NHS Trusts have already adopted the platform, which provides the health service with a new operating system intended to link up otherwise unconnected databases and disparate software across different NHS services and regions.
This lack of clarity was laid bare this week, when the UK’s cross-party Science, Innovation and Technology Committee urged the government to break the NHS’s contract with Palantir. Its report contained a stark recommendation to the government: reveal “the exact nature of Palantir’s access to identifiable and non-identifiable patient data, on what statutory basis this was authorised, when, and by whom.”
McCann and the Good Law Project are part of an unusually wide coalition demanding the UK cut ties with Palantir, but technologists who have worked closely on the FDP warn that the genie is now out of the bottle; kicking the US giant out of the NHS may not be enough to solve the data privacy problems its Federated Data Platform has created.
“You know you could pull Palantir out,” Tom Bartlett, an NHS technologist who worked on the FDP and has spoken publicly in favour of the project, told openDemocracy. “But the danger remains.”
“You still might get a government that says, ‘We need to have the data from the NHS and the data from the Home Office connected, and we want to use it for the purpose of denying people healthcare or deporting people or whatever’.”
Coalition of Resistance
To understand how deeply Palantir is enmeshed in the UK’s public sector, consider the coalition opposed to it.
NHS data analysts and chief data and analytical officers have spoken out against the FDP. The British Medical Association, a union representing doctors and medical students, has urged GPs to reject it. The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, which oversees NHS services for 2.8 million people, has refused to sign up to the platform, claiming outstanding security risks haven’t been addressed, and that it has better technology in-house.
It’s not just the NHS, either. London’s mayor has blocked a £50m Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police, arguing that it was improperly awarded. The housing ministry replaced a Palantir system to match British hosts with Ukrainian refugees with its own technology. In Coventry, local politicians and unions are protesting the renewal of a £750,000 Palantir contract with the council’s children’s services department. Financial Conduct Authority employees are seeking to orchestrate a cross-union campaign against a 12-week trial contract with Palantir that they fear could expose the UK’s sensitive financial data to US law enforcement authorities.
“Our pilot with Palantir allows the Met for the first time to bring together data it already lawfully holds in one place to identify potential standards, welfare or cultural concerns,” said a spokesperson for The Met over email. “It also allows us to identify early issues so we can act more fairly and consistently, ensuring officers receive support or face appropriate action before problems escalate.” In April, Met officers expressed outrage at the “intrusive” use of Palantir’s technology to assess them for misconduct.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s contract with Palantir involves testing an AI search tool for its data. “The data used in the trial will be fully encrypted and under our control,” wrote a spokesperson for the regulator over email. “No-one is able to access the unencrypted data without our authorisation.”
Coventry City Council did not respond to questions about its Palantir contract.
He co-founded the company with $2 million from the venture capital arm of the CIA in the early 2000s, when the failure to prevent 9/11 was being debated across Washington and Silicon Valley. It was suspected, and would be confirmed by the public report a year later, that the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency had separately held the data required to have foreseen the terror attacks, but had “failed to connect the dots”.
That finding has since been the basis of much of Palantir’s success. It argues that governments, militaries, law enforcement authorities and businesses already have much of the data they need to make decisions, but that it is not readily available in the forms needed.
Palantir, it tells them, is the solution.
“The actual thing that’s difficult is organising all your data together,” Alex Bores, a member of the New York State Assembly and a former Palantir employee turned critic, told The New York Times. “That requires hard work, and there’s no magic to do that yet. The software, plus engineers going on site and doing a lot of that hard work to do the manual hookups, was always going to be the true source of value.”
Databasing the Nation
In the NHS, Palantir’s work involves organising, hooking up, and streamlining vast troves of patient data currently scattered across, by one count, 44,000 healthcare IT systems in 26,000 organisations. “The fragmentation is absolutely massive,” said Bartlett, who helped build the FDP. “There’s all this information, and it’s all sat in different pockets.”
Palantir’s solution has two layers. Bartlett describes one layer as an “operating system” analogous to the software that runs your iPhone, which will allow NHS Trusts and third-party developers to create applications (or what Palantir calls “products”) that allow for efficiency gains. An ambulance crew, for example, could input information about an accident victim to a product that would pass it onto the hospital, so that “the A&E department could prepare, rather than being sort of hit in the face” with information when the ambulance arrives, he said.
Yet, much like how your iPhone decisively locks you into the ecosystem of Apple products, running this system efficiently requires as much of the NHS as possible to sign on to the Palantir system – something experts call “vendor lock-in” – and to draw on a staggering library of data held across the health service.
The FDP’s public documentation reveals that the platform is already in the process of ingesting several hundred databases, covering a vast array of variables that include mental healthcare contact activity, mortality, flu vaccination status, covid vaccination status, emergency services data, race and ethnicity, aggregated data for persons held in secure mental health facilities in adult prisons and immigration removal centres, and much more.
As the cross-party committee of MPs noted in their report last week, there is little clarity around exactly what data will make it into the FDP, and how it will be accessed. The debate around patient data held by GP practices offers a useful illustration.
Back in 2023, the then secretary of state for health and social care, Victoria Atkins, told the House of Commons: “No new data will be collected, and GP data will not be part of the national platform.” However, an NHS FAQ page last updated in April 2026 admits that “some of the data” in the FDP “may have been sourced from GP records”, and GP data lawfully shared with NHS trusts that use the FDP could end up on the platform.
More worryingly, the FDP uses all this data to create detailed profiles of individual patients that it calls the ‘Person Ontology’. To quote from an NHS Data Protection Impact Assessment: “The Person Ontology serves as the single source of the truth for pseudonymised patient level datasets”.
Elsewhere, the document says that “the Person Ontology currently holds activity data for citizens in different care settings”, explaining that the platform assigns individual patients a unique ID that can be cross-referenced across multiple databases.
The NHS says that as the data held in the FDP is pseudonymised, it does not directly identify individuals. But pseudonymisation, as has been pointed out by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection watchdog, is a reversible process. “Take care not to confuse pseudonymisation with anonymisation,” the ICO warns.
A person’s healthcare data is their “most intimate information,” said a spokesperson and legal officer at Privacy International, a UK-based charity focusing on technology and rights. “We’re talking about the breadth of the data, how personal it is, and the severity of what could be done with it if it were to land in the wrong hands.”
Big Data Means Big Brother
Consolidating so much data brings very real risks of surveillance, say those familiar with the platform, particularly since Palantir also holds contracts with police forces in the UK. In principle, all that’s stopping the Home Office from accessing NHS data are legal safeguards that can be reversed.
Here in the UK, Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley has said that if Nigel Farage’s Reform comes into power, the company will follow the party’s professed directives to use NHS data to target individuals based on their immigration status.
Such a scenario played out in the US when Trump first became president in 2016, as Bores, the former Palantir employee, told The New York Times.
“Palantir had signed a contract with a department within ICE called HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. During the Obama administration, it was focused on anti-human trafficking, anti-drug trafficking, sometimes counterfeiting,” Bores said. “Then, when Trump comes in in 2017, they try to change the nature of that work. They try to get another part of ICE called ERO, Enforcement and Removal Operations – the part that everyone thinks of as ICE – to get access to the software and to use it for deportations.”
In the US, Palantir already uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services to track people targeted for deportation by ICE. Here in the UK, junior doctor Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, who is organising against Palantir in the NHS with health justice organisation Medact, described what she said was a disturbing pattern: “Reform’s policy ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ wants to create a powerful immigration surveillance system by mining data from health, police and financial databases. Louis Mosley said his company would comply with this.
“Palantir’s police contracts in the UK include collating highly sensitive information on victims of crime, including sexual orientation and trade union membership. The home secretary says she wants to create a panopticon of state surveillance. The synergy between Palantir and governments who use data to abuse human rights is deeply alarming, and a sign of what could be coming in the UK.”
This is a real risk, conceded Bartlett. “Let’s take [a] Reform government and the immigration question coming in, I do worry about that scenario,” he said – but he questioned whether that means the NHS doesn’t need a Federated Data Platform. “So is the answer to that bad scenario playing out to keep the data in such a bad state that nobody could ever use it at all for good or bad?”
Palantir, NHS England, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care and The Reform Party did not respond to requests for comment.
Critics of the FDP, however, have pushed back against what they see as a narrative that the NHS’s systems are so hopelessly complex and tangled that the only way to solve them is with a mass surveillance tool built by Palantir.
“There’s no magic here,” Sam Smith, a technologist with patient rights organisation medConfidential, said of the FDP. “It’s not like Palantir is doing anything that other people can’t do… They’re just doing the thing because they have the mythos that they can do the thing.”
Andrew Holway, the founder of UK-based medical software startup Darwinist, told the cross-party committee that “the primary barrier to NHS innovation” is mega contracts with companies such as Palantir. These, he said, hold the NHS “hostage, preventing the implementation of modern productivity tools that could save tens of billions of pounds”.
Some in the NHS have also questioned whether the service has tried different approaches that are less intrusive and data-centric. The NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, for instance, uses its own Analytics and Data Science Platform because it believes it offers better technology and access to better data.
“Public trust isn’t a side issue for the Federated Data Platform,” wrote Matt Hennessey, the chief data and analytics officer at Manchester Integrated Care Board, in a post on LinkedIn. He outlined the “effect that ethical concern, moral unease or perceived opacity has on trust–and, in turn, on participation.”
The platform’s “main problem is that it isn’t clear what it actually is,” he wrote. “Where trust is eroded, people disengage, patients opt out, and clinicians become cautious about involvement.”
Ultimately, as Osborne said, “any NHS data system must be built on public trust, buy-in from staff, and most importantly, protection from abuse by private corporations and governments themselves”.
NHS staff blockade the entrance to NHS England’s headquarters in central London demanding the cancellation of its contract with Palantir, which supplies advanced technology to Israel’s military, April 3, 2024
