TL;DR

NHS England lists 29 hospital trusts as “realising benefits” from Palantir’s £330m federated data platform, yet those trusts say it is not live or that they use none of its applications, the Guardian reported on 2 November. The finding rests on over 100 FOI requests by the campaign charity Medact. The Office for Statistics Regulation says it is “taking this forward under our casework function”.

The replies are blunt. Epsom and St Helier is “not using FDP at the moment”. Mersey Care had “not yet gone live”. The North Midlands university hospitals trust went further: “FDP is not live. We do not intend to roll it out in the future.”

One senior health official told the paper that the gap was “very misleading”. Marc Farr, chair of a network of NHS chief data officers, said benefits need to be reported in a way that “can be properly verified”.

What NHS England and Palantir say

Both defend the programme. NHS England told the Guardian that nearly 140 trusts “have now reported benefits”, and has said previously that its list includes back-office uses such as data submission, not only patient care. Torbay and South Devon illustrates the distinction: the trust says it is “not currently operationally using the FDP”, while NHS England counts it as live because the plumbing for data submission exists.

So the dispute may partly be definitional. A trust can submit data through the platform without staff ever opening an application. It is still a problem for a claim that reads, to most people, as a hospital getting value from AI.

Palantir points to 117,000 additional operations, a 14.3% cut in discharge delays for long-stay patients and a 5.6% improvement in 28-day cancer diagnosis. The operations figure has its own history. The Guardian says NHS England admitted this summer that causation could not be shown, and that the OSR has already investigated.

The contract decision ahead

The timing matters because of a 2027 break clause, part of the contract pressure we covered in October. Science committee chair Chi Onwurah wants that clause used, followed by a contest open to UK-owned suppliers, and the Guardian says the health committee also wants the deal pulled. Palantir’s Louis Mosley says ending it would be “putting politics above patients”. The company has also hired Tom Watson as a lobbyist.

Looking Forward

Medact campaigns against the contract, so its reading is not neutral, but the trusts’ words are their own. In our view, the question for any UK organisation buying AI is simple: does “benefits” mean a system connected, or people using it? Until NHS England publishes which use each listed trust actually reports, ministers will be weighing the break clause on a number that cannot yet be tested.