The controversy surrounding Palantir use by NHS and Met Police continues

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has been granted a 12-month extension to a pilot project with the controversial US-based technology company Palantir while it conducts a procurement process. The development follows a decision by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to block a £50 million contract between MPS and the company to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. The Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) cited a clear and serious breach of procurement rules, stating that MPS had seriously considered only a single supplier. Lawyers representing Palantir contacted the MOPAC to indicate their intention to challenge the ban in court. In the meantime, MPS will now spend the next 12 months running a more fit-for-purpose procurement process to formally appoint a supplier.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times (£) reports that NHS England has admitted major claims about the benefits of its £330 million contract with Palantir are not causationally robust, prompting calls for an independent audit. The NHS previously attributed a 15% reduction in discharge delays and 110,000 additional operations to Palantir's Federated Data Platform (FDP). However, an updated methodology page now notes that conclusions about cause and effect cannot be drawn because other variables were uncontrolled.

This disclaimer, absent from earlier archived pages, follows an FT analysis showing that performance gains occurred in only a handful of trusts, with some trusts performing fewer operations post-adoption. Critics argue the data fails to account for other NHS improvements that would have happened anyway. As a consequence, the non-profit campaign group Foxglove has written to Health Secretary James Murray to question when the disclaimer was added and why Parliament has not been notified about these figures.

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