Sadiq Khan blocks £50m Met Police deal with Palantir over procurement breach

TL;DR:

• London mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked Scotland Yard’s £50m AI contract with US firm Palantir, citing a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules; the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) said the Met seriously considered only one supplier.
• The deal would have been Palantir’s largest UK policing contract to date, on top of £330m and £240m deals with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence, and was intended to automate intelligence analysis amid a Met £125m funding shortfall and 1,150 planned job cuts.
• Foxglove campaign director Donald Campbell warns Palantir uses a “land and expand” approach — winning small or free contracts to build wider public-services roles — a pattern raised by the government’s chief commercial officer back in 2023.

This is the first major UK public-services AI procurement to be killed at political level, and the fact that it is the Met Police makes it a precedent. The Met argued that without the technology it would have to cut officer numbers further; Khan’s office countered that a tight budget makes proper procurement scrutiny more important, not less. Both positions sound reasonable, which is exactly why the row reframes the central question for UK public-sector AI: who decides what “value for money” means when the alternative to AI is fewer staff?

The Met-Palantir row reaches the heart of public-services AI

Guardian companion analysis on the same day positioned this as “bot v bobby” — the Home Office under Shabana Mahmood has called for police to “ramp up use of AI” at pace and scale, Labour has stood up a Police AI national centre, and Scotland Yard’s leadership concluded Palantir was the only vendor that could deliver the integrated intelligence-platform capability it wanted. But Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey’s computer science research centre told the Guardian British companies could build the same tools given time and funding — “We have the expertise. What is needed is the development of the businesses.” The political read on Khan’s veto is therefore not “no AI in policing” but “not this vendor, not this way”.

Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, welcomed City Hall’s review of “vendor lock-in and dependence on a small number of large, US-based providers”. For UK SMEs in policing technology, defence-tech and govtech, the practical signal is that procurement-framework gaming — Scotland Yard used the Crown Commercial Service framework but, City Hall says, did not allow other suppliers to bid — is now under live political scrutiny.

Looking forward

There is no block on Palantir bidding for a future Met contract; Mopac said it wants to work with the Met on a new procurement plan. But the wider Whitehall-and-Wales pattern is clearer this week. With NHS England, MoD and now Met Police all sitting on or unwinding large Palantir contracts, expect select-committee hearings on AI procurement frameworks before recess, fresh scrutiny of the £500,000 City Hall approval threshold (which the Met used to award an earlier Palantir contract without competition), and pressure on Cabinet Office to issue updated guidance on “land and expand” supplier behaviour.