I understand this instinct, so let me be precise about our red lines. We have never worked in China, Russia, or any state we consider adversarial to Western values. Where we work with governments on policies that some object to – like US immigration enforcement – we do so because those governments have a democratic mandate to carry them out. I do not want to live in a world where unelected tech bosses get to decide which lawful government policies may be delivered.
The report alleges a “clear mismatch” between Palantir and British values. So what are the values of the NHS? They are delivering care to patients across England, free at the point of delivery. That is what our software helps NHS staff do. To tear up a contract won through an 18-month open competition, in which every major tech company bid and 30 independent evaluators assessed the field, would be to override a fair, expert process for political ends.
Where it cannot win on politics, the committee turns to the language of national security – sovereignty, dependency, lock-in. But these fears describe a platform that does not exist.
The first is that funnelling so much of the NHS’s data through a single American company creates a chokepoint a foreign power could one day exploit, leaving the service “at the mercy” of others. But there is no central vault to seize. Each NHS trust controls its own data; Palantir cannot use it, sell it, or move it. This is a fact a health minister has confirmed to Parliament.
The second is that Palantir will be impossible to remove. Yet it already has been. Over the past two years two Government departments – the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Cabinet Office – moved off our software and took their data and intellectual property elsewhere without difficulty.
The committee’s alternative – build a replacement platform in-house or find a UK-based alternative – runs straight into its own report, which catalogues the NHS’s long and painful history of in-house IT projects that overran, under-delivered or collapsed. No UK-based platform exists at this scale or capability today. Recommending that ministers tear up the contract in February 2027 – months away – without naming a credible replacement is reckless. Would those MPs tell their constituents: because we dislike the way a foreign government uses similar software, your operation will be delayed?