NHS England’s Federated Data Platform, built and run by Palantir Technologies, poses risks to patient trust, staff wellbeing, data quality, national sovereignty and the long-term integrity of NHS data infrastructure.
We should know, we’re the people working on it.
That’s why NHS Analysts Together has launched an open letter on the FDP and Palantir Technologies, open to all data and digital workers in NHS organisations to sign with their name or anonymously. We believe we must collectively express our serious professional, ethical and practical concerns over the software – before it is too late.
Data and digital professionals in large organisations are rarely encouraged to question the tools we are given to do our work, with procurement decisions typically a top-down affair over which we have little to no influence. But for those of us at NHS England, the need for scrutiny became urgent when Palantir won a contract to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP) in November 2023, and intensified two months later when it announced a strategic partnership with the Israeli Military.
NHS Analysts Together was born during the FDP's procurement phase. A small group of data analysts anonymously emailed everyone working in Data & Analytics at NHS England to ask what they thought about one supplier in the running: Palantir.
Some respondents questioned why such key public infrastructure was being outsourced at all – “There are many talented analysts within the NHS that could have built this system, why are we not investing in our own talent?” – and others cited the links between Palantir and alleged human rights abuses.
Due to the anonymous nature of the survey, the results were not taken into consideration by NHS England. NHS Analysts Together went quiet, the FDP contract was awarded, and senior NHS officials became increasingly hostile towards those who raised concerns about Palantir's ethics or the effectiveness of its software.
But analysts and other data workers continued to be quietly outraged at the NHS's willingness to work with a company known for its role in military operations, deportations and surveillance. Eventually, some of these workers found each other, and NHS Analysts Together resurfaced in November 2025. Some members were using the FDP in their roles, some knew they would have to soon, and others hoped their teams would not adopt use of the FDP at any pace.
Some supporters of the FDP are pushing the narrative that the software is brilliant and there is no viable alternative. What can be inferred from this that we should ignore the alleged human rights abuses committed using Palantir's tools.
As data workers, we reject a false distinction between the ethics of a supplier and the effectiveness of the tools we use. The quality of our datasets is useful only when staff, patients and the public trust the NHS to hold their data securely.
NHS England is demanding that data workers across the NHS, from local hospitals to national teams, put huge amounts of sensitive health data into Palantir's FDP. Meanwhile, Palantir's UK CEO, Louis Mosley, publicly confirmed that if Reform UK wins the next election with a “clear public mandate” to share health data for the purposes of mass deportation efforts, the company will adhere to this.
Many of us don't want to work on the software at all, knowing that any improvements we make ultimately benefit a company involved in genocide, deportations and warfare.
When it comes to the software itself, the Palantir emperor has no clothes. We have first-hand experience of the failings of the FDP, from insufficient data security to a reliance on Palantir staff. In our experience, the software offers flashy dashboards but poor data processing and analytical capability, and focuses on 'ingesting' high volumes of data rather than the practicalities of what users need. The claims of benefit to patients are frequently based on significantly flawed methodology.
Using a single-vendor, commercially owned platform introduces significant new risks around data sovereignty and commercial dependency. Our ability to improve the software we use, for example, through sharing open-source and in-house innovation, is hampered by a company whose intention is to create “software that dominates”. It was always a political choice to hand Palantir control of our health data systems while cutting the jobs of hundreds of NHS data professionals and refusing to invest in our internal capacity.
As the Palantir roll-out becomes increasingly aggressive internally, with more and more of us under pressure from senior leadership to migrate our work to the FDP, concerns are being silenced. Meanwhile, Palantir is escalating its political influence and support for violent military operations. This is the most important time to act collectively as NHS workers.
Today, we have launched an open letter on the FDP and Palantir Technologies, which we will submit to senior leadership at NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care in June, and use it to build our collective organising.
We object to working on Palantir's FDP – it is not, and was never, the right choice for NHS data infrastructure. NHS England must not renew Palantir's contract, and we will fight internally to make that happen. There is a better way, and we are willing to build it ourselves.
