All 29 hospital trusts that NHS England publicly lists as "realising benefits" from Palantir's £330 million federated data platform have said the system is not live or that they are not using any of its applications.
The gap surfaced in responses to more than 100 freedom of information requests obtained by Medact, a medical charity campaigning to remove Palantir from the NHS. The Office for Statistics Regulation, the official statistics watchdog, said it will take the matter forward under its casework function.
The findings add pressure on Health Secretary Yvette Cooper, who faces calls from MPs and campaigners to scrap the contract. The Commons health select committee wants ministers to pull the deal, and Chi Onwurah, who chairs the science and technology committee, urged the government to trigger a 2027 break clause and open a competition for a UK-owned supplier to handle patient records.
If many NHS trusts don’t see the value of the FDP, serious questions need to be asked about whether the hype surrounding Palantir’s products matches reality.
Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee
What the hospitals said
Several trusts were blunt. Epsom and St Helier said it was not using the platform, Kent and Medway said it was not live, and Mersey Care said it had not yet gone live.
Nottingham University Hospitals said no implementation timeline had been agreed. University Hospitals of North Midlands went further, saying the system is not live and it does not intend to roll it out.
NHS England's website says 137 trusts are live with the platform, and the agency maintained that nearly 140 have reported benefits from its tools. It has said before that its list includes trusts using the platform for back-office data analysis and submission rather than patient care.
Torbay and South Devon, for example, said it is not operationally using the platform, but NHS England counts it as live because infrastructure is in place for data submission. Trusts that say they don't use the system may still use a small part of it to help calculate treatment costs.
I am concerned to hear that there are 29 trusts reported as receiving benefits but when asked are not actually using the tool.
Marc Farr, chair of the NHS Chief Data and Analytics Officers Network
Palantir pushes back
NHS England has faced earlier questions over its defense of the contract, which began in 2024. It credited the platform with 117,539 additional operations in a year but conceded this summer that it could not prove cause and effect, prompting a watchdog investigation.
A Palantir spokesperson cited those operations along with a 14.3% cut in discharge delays for long-stay patients and a 5.6% improvement in people learning within 28 days whether they have cancer. Louis Mosley, the company's UK and Europe chief executive, said ending the contract would put politics above patients.
Palantir hired former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson last month as a full-time senior lobbyist. He and Mosley have written to critical MPs in letters tallying how often they had spoken against the company, which Labour's Clive Lewis called "very Big Brother."
