By Andy Ford, Chair Unite NW Health Committee
US firm Palantir already has a £300 million contract to connect NHS data. They have said themselves that they are “buying our way in” to the NHS, and recent revelations in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) shed a little bit more light on what exactly that involves.
Much weight has been placed by Starmer’s ministers on a pilot study at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, which purported to show major productivity gains resulting from deploying Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) to help manage operating theatre time allocations, and the elective surgery waiting list. Chelsea and Westminster is one of the most politically connected hospitals in the country. Being just over the bridge from Parliament, it frequently hosts ministers visiting for photo-ops and for making speeches with doctors and nurses in the background.
However, the BMJ has now seen the data behind the Chelsea and Westminster pilot, which indicates that the improved performance hailed by Palantir’s backers would have happened anyway. The pilot began in December 2021 when the performance of the whole NHS was damaged and depressed by the Omicron wave of Covid, with mass staff sickness, patient no-shows and severe operational disruption. The recovery at Chelsea and Westminster post-2021 was simply ascribed to Palantir!
In the words of the BMJ:
“From late 2020 through 2022, Chelsea and Westminster and other trusts in the region follow almost identical trajectories: sharp performance declines during covid waves, followed by recovery as pressures eased.
Critically, these data show no meaningful difference between FDP adopters and non-adopters: there is no evidence of a unique impact of the FDP at Chelsea and Westminster.”
The other Trusts, without using Palantir, showed a very similar improvement in productivity.
Claimed reduction in waiting lists
Also, a claimed reduction in the waiting list at Chelsea and Westminster of 28% – oft-quoted by ministers – may also not stand up to scrutiny. It never had any dates or specialties detailed, but public records show the waiting lists actually rising over the four years after the adoption of FDP. The general surgery list rose by 12% and gynaecology by 4%.
In the words of Alice in Wonderland, “Curiouser and curiouser!”
But that’s not all. The Chair of the Chelsea and Westminster Trust from April 2022 to March 2026, Matthew Swindells, previously worked for Peter Mandelson’s international lobbying firm, Global Counsel, where he was in charge of its healthcare advisory committee. Revelations in the Epstein Files showed that Peter Mandelson probably played a key role in bringing together Palantir and Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting.
The Trust did say that Swindells would be “excluded from any decisions related to Palantir”, but how that was done, and whether it would even be possible to exclude the Trust chair from influence over such decisions is not at all clear. And once the FDP was in place, Swindells returned to Palantir!
And there’s more. Justin Whatling, the innovation advisor to the hospital’s charitable body, was managing director of global health and life sciences at Palantir from 2021 to 2025, and was a co-author with Swindells of a Palantir paper launching its FDP back in 2021.
There has to be an independent investigation. Already there are calls from backbench MPs across the spectrum for the government to cancel the Palantir contract.
Andy Ford is standing for the Unite NEC in the Health section. His election statement and other articles by him can be found on his website, here. This is taken, with his permission, from Andy’s website.
[Feature picture is of a protest against Palantir’s role in Israel, from Wikimedia Commons, here]
