TL;DR
Sixty thousand people pulled their medical records out of NHS research over a two-month stretch this summer, and a minister has now put that on the record as a Palantir problem. Health innovation minister James Frith told the Commons health committee he is worried about what mistrust of the company does to people’s willingness to hand over data at all. Ministers must still decide whether to break a £330m contract.
What the minister told MPs
Frith put the concern in writing to Layla Moran, who chairs the committee. Between mid-May and mid-July, 60,000 additional people used the national data opt-out to withdraw their information — a rise he said moved in step with press attention on the company’s NHS role. He called the increase modest, and said it would keep being watched.
Opting out changes nothing about direct care. A patient’s records still travel with them into an operating theatre. What disappears is the pool available for research and for planning services. Frith was blunt about where that leads: “It may not be possible to realise the benefits of the 10-year health plan if patients stop sharing their data.”
The contract in question
Palantir runs the federated data platform on a seven-year deal worth £330m. Doctors’ and patients’ groups want Labour to use the break clause, pointing at the company’s work for the Israeli military and for ICE, the US immigration agency under Trump, and disputing that it represents value for money.
The performance claims are contested rather than settled. Palantir says trusts running its software recorded 110,000 extra operations, cut delays in discharging long-stay patients by 15%, and improved 28-day cancer diagnosis by 6.8%. NHS England has published broadly matching figures while saying it could not “draw conclusions about cause and effect”. The UK Statistics Authority is examining the data.
A position that moved
Parliament was told in July that trusts “must use” parts of the platform. Frith has now said there is no such requirement and that trusts may prefer something else — a shift Moran welcomed, though she still wants the provider changed rather than the contract extended, and warned against letting the decision drift to February. The health department insists nothing has changed.
Looking forward
The opt-out numbers are the part UK organisations should watch, because they price something that is usually argued about in the abstract: what supplier choice costs in consent. Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m Metropolitan Police contract on similar reasoning and is being sued for it. This follows our coverage last week of GPs carrying unlimited personal liability as NHS data moves — the same trust architecture, seen from the surgery rather than Whitehall.