Palantir’s role in the NHS is once again under political scrutiny after MPs urged ministers to prepare to replace the company’s £330 million Federated Data Platform contract when a break clause becomes available next year.
The renewed debate follows questions over the evidence used to support claims about the platform’s benefits, alongside wider concerns about supplier concentration, patient trust and long-term control of NHS data.
But while much of the discussion has focused on Palantir itself, digital leaders speaking at a recent OpenUK roundtable argued that decades of procurement decisions have left the public sector overly dependent on a small number of technology suppliers.
Beyond Palantir
Mike Bracken, founder of Public Digital and former executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), pointed to what he described as the UK’s growing dependence on overseas infrastructure.
“Our dependence on a small number of hyperscalers and on dreadful legacy in many sectors means we need rapid action on this right now,” he said.
While the NHS Federated Data Platform has become one of the most visible examples of supplier concentration, Bracken argued that the debate should not become solely about Palantir.
“It is not actually about Palantir,” he said.
Instead, he argued that the NHS and wider public sector have failed to create sufficiently open and competitive technology markets.
“We generally want market activity. We generally want competition. We generally want innovation. You have to create markets. [We] do not create markets by handing single control of a federated platform, in this case, to single companies.”
Sovereignty means control
John Harms, head of government solutions at UK AI firm Quantexa, told Think Digital Partners that as AI becomes embedded in critical public services, organisations should judge sovereignty by whether they retain authority “under conditions of stress, disruption or political change”.
“This is what we call ‘control under distress’,” he said.
“Viewed through that lens, the real question is not whether a supplier is domestic or foreign, but whether the vendor enables institutions to maintain governance, transparency, portability and accountability.”
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He added that foreign technology providers “can absolutely play a role in sovereign systems”, but warned that many platforms were not designed to give customers meaningful control over decision-making, data lineage and operational independence.
“The public sector should therefore prioritise architectures that preserve institutional authority, create competitive markets, and ensure they can govern, explain and adapt AI-driven decisions without becoming locked into a single vendor,” said Harms.
“Sovereignty is ultimately about retaining control of outcomes, not just ownership of infrastructure.”
Competition and resilience
Laura Gilbert, senior director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute, questioned whether the UK was making sufficient use of domestic technical expertise.
“We have the skills in the UK to build this kind of platform,” she said.
She also warned of the risks associated with relying on a single supplier for critical national infrastructure.
“Locking down your single vendor is clearly risky when it’s something so important.”
Gilbert argued that government should ensure greater value is created from public sector data.
“We should be learning from that data, building a better health service, not allowing an offshore company to learn and build better products they can sell to somebody else.”
At the same event, former science minister Lord Drayson suggested the controversy surrounding the NHS Federated Data Platform should be viewed as a warning about a much wider structural issue.
“Palantir is the canary in the coal mine,” he said, adding that the debate comes down to democratic accountability.
“For me, it really is about democracy,” he said. “We have control over it, we have influence, we’re able to say these are our values.”
