NHS says 29 hospital trusts benefit from Palantir AI — they say they barely use it
A Guardian investigation found NHS England counted hospitals as "realising benefits" from its £330m Palantir data platform even though those trusts say they aren't using it.
What happened: More than 100 freedom of information requests, filed by the campaign group Medact and shared with the Guardian, found that 29 NHS trusts NHS England lists as "realising benefits" from Palantir's £330m Federated Data Platform say they are not using the system or most of its tools. Examples include Epsom and St Helier, Kent and Medway, Mersey Care, Nottingham University Hospitals, and University Hospitals of North Midlands — the last of which said it has no plans to ever roll the platform out. NHS England's website separately lists 137 trusts as "live" with the system.
Why it matters: The findings reopen questions about a flagship contract meant to connect patient records, speed up discharges and improve surgery scheduling across the NHS. Earlier this year NHS England had to concede it could not prove its headline claim — that trusts using the platform carried out 117,539 more operations — was actually caused by the software, triggering a watchdog investigation now moving into formal casework. MPs on both the Commons science and health select committees want the contract scrapped or opened to competition, arguing the gap between official claims and trusts' own accounts undermines trust in how government justifies big technology spending.
What counts as 'benefiting', plainly: NHS England defines "benefiting" broadly: a trust can count even if it uses only a sliver of the platform, such as submitting data to calculate treatment costs, rather than the clinical tools meant to speed up patient care. Torbay and South Devon's trust, for instance, is listed as "live" purely because its data-submission infrastructure is switched on, not because staff are using Palantir's apps for patients. That loose definition lets NHS England count trusts as succeeding even when wards never touch the software — something the NHS's own data chiefs say risks public confidence if not reported honestly.
The politics around it: The contract includes a break clause in 2027, which critics including science committee chair Chi Onwurah want activated in favour of a UK-based alternative. Palantir, which also supplies AI to the Israeli military and the Trump administration's homeland security operations, has hired former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson as a lobbyist and is directly contacting MPs who raise concerns. Its UK chief executive dismisses criticism as "Palantir Derangement Syndrome" and says scrapping the deal would put politics over patients, while the Office for Statistics Regulation now formally examines NHS England's benefit claims.