Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
More than 44,000 people use GDPR objections to make NHS England defend its Palantir platform
More than 44,000 people have filed legal objections that oblige NHS England to stop using their records on its Palantir platform or show a compelling reason. Those answers come as ministers weigh whether to use a February 2027 break clause in the £330m contract.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- The formal objections cite article 21 of the UK GDPR and state that Palantir's involvement undermines the objectors' personal trust in NHS data confidentiality.
- Those filing have also asked NHS England to halt processing of their data through the platform while their main requests are assessed.
- Two House of Commons select committees have called on Labour to exercise the break clause in the seven-year deal.
- Hundreds of thousands have signed petitions to cancel the deal, and Andy Burnham must decide within months whether to back or axe Palantir.
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Why it matters
- exposure The campaign targets Palantir, but the legal duty to stop or justify sits with NHS England, so any weakness in its answers becomes a data-protection problem for the health service.
- constraint If NHS England grants the requested pause, those records stop being processed on the platform before any objection is decided, whatever the eventual ruling.
- precedent 38 Degrees has shown a campaign can turn supporters into individual legal requests that each require an answer, a route open against other contested public data contracts.
The board-deck version of this story is a headcount. On that measure the 44,000 objections look modest next to the hundreds of thousands who signed petitions against the deal [1][3]. "The scale of this public backlash should be a huge wake-up call for the government," said Veronica Hawking, campaigns director at 38 Degrees, the not-for-profit that coordinated the objections [13]. Scale is the weaker part of her case. A petition asks ministers for something. An objection is a legal request, and NHS England has said "we will respond to the objection requests in line with data protection law" [14].
The rule the objectors invoked sets NHS England's trade-off. It has to stop using their data or show a "compelling reason" to continue [2]. Stopping takes records out of a platform that Palantir says is designed to connect health service data on topics such as surgery schedules and discharge planning [8]. Continuing means writing down a justification for people who have said they no longer trust the arrangement [11]. NHS England's statement does not give a timetable for its answers [14].
The obvious material for a compelling reason is the supplier's own performance data. "Palantir software is helping to deliver better care, with trusts using it recording 117,000 additional operations, a 14.3% reduction in discharge delays for long stay patients and a 5.6% improvement in the number of people finding out whether or not they have cancer within 28 days," a Palantir spokesperson said [10]. Those are Palantir's figures. Jim Mackey, NHS England's chief executive, has acknowledged concerns that the platform's benefits may not be as significant as claimed [7].
Louis Mosley, Palantir's executive vice-president for UK and Europe, has accused people who dispute the company's account of those benefits of suffering from "Palantir derangement syndrome" [9]. The objections themselves are about trust [11]. David Murray, a retired IBM systems engineer who filed one, said: "I am a believer in the NHS having really good data on their patients, but I want it to be something you can really trust to be used for the right purposes" [5]. He added: "I am not happy about Palantir's involvement with the IDF in Gaza and ICE in America" [6]. Palantir said patient data can only be handled on the NHS's instructions and stays in the UK [12]. That covers where the data sits and who directs it. The campaigners' anger is about the company's work for the Israeli military and Donald Trump's ICE immigration crackdown [16].
In my view the objections will bear on the contract less through their number than through the reasons NHS England gives in reply. The contract runs for seven years, with a break clause in February 2027 [4]. Spread evenly, £330m over that term comes to about £47m a year [1].
What to watch
- NHS England's replies to the objections: how many it upholds, and whether any compelling reason it cites rests on Palantir's performance figures.
- Whether NHS England grants the request to pause processing on the platform while the objections are assessed.
- Andy Burnham's decision on whether to back or axe Palantir, and whether Labour uses the February 2027 break clause the select committees want.