Sheffield Just Said What the Rest of England Is Thinking
The first council in the country has voted to push Palantir out of the NHS. Ministers should listen before the 2027 review, not after.
Let me ask you a question that sounds technical and is anything but. Who should hold the keys to your medical records: the health service you own, or a Californian surveillance firm best known for its work with spies, soldiers and immigration agents?
Sheffield has given its answer, Sheffield City Council became the first local authority in England to approve a motion formally opposing Palantir’s involvement in the NHS Federated Data Platform. The motion, tabled by Green councillor Toby Mallinson and seconded by Lynsey Angell, passed with the support of 62 councillors and a single vote against, after Labour and Liberal Democrat amendments. Read that margin again. This was not a fringe gesture. It was a city speaking almost with one voice.
The council is calling on Sheffield’s NHS trusts and the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board to freeze integration with the platform, and urging ministers to terminate NHS England’s contract with Palantir when it comes up for review in 2027.
What is actually at stake
The Federated Data Platform is sold to us in the language of common sense. Palantir signed a £330 million contract in 2023 to provide the FDP, which enables NHS organisations to share and analyse operational data: joining up fragmented systems, planning services, cutting waiting lists. Who could object to that?
Nobody objects to that. That is the trick of it. The objection is not to a modern NHS. The objection is to the landlord.
Palantir is not a healthcare company that stumbled into controversy. Surveillance is the business. Councillors in Sheffield heard that Palantir supplied health data in the US to support ICE agents in identifying people for deportation. Amnesty International, which backs the campaign against the contract, points to the company’s tools being used by the Israeli military in Gaza and by ICE to track and surveil migrants. Whatever the legal firewalls, this is the character of the firm we have invited to sit at the heart of the most intimate database in Britain.
And Sheffield is not shouting alone. On 3 June, the cross-party House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called for the government to terminate NHS England’s contract with Palantir. The British Medical Association has called on NHS doctors to limit their use of the FDP over concerns about Palantir’s work with US immigration enforcement. Doctors, MPs of all colours, human rights organisations, and now an elected council. At some point a pattern stops being a protest and becomes a verdict.
We have been here before
If you want the historical parallel, you do not need to reach far. A decade ago, NHS England tried to hoover up GP records under a scheme called care.data. It was technically defensible and politically catastrophic. The public was not consulted so much as informed, trust collapsed, and the whole programme was scrapped in 2016. When the successor GP data scheme surfaced in 2021, millions of people opted out of data sharing rather than take the state’s word for it.
That is the lesson our institutions keep refusing to learn. NHS data projects do not die because the technology fails. They die because trust fails first. And trust, once burnt, does not come back with a press release.
Imagine a woman in Hillsborough who has spent years working up the courage to tell her GP about her mental health. She reads that her records now flow through a platform run by a firm that works for military and immigration agencies. She is not a conspiracy theorist. She is a rational person doing a rational calculation, and next time she says less. Sheffield’s motion made precisely this point: fears about private companies managing NHS data could push patients to opt out of data sharing, damaging the research and planning the platform is supposed to enable. The tool destroys the resource it feeds on.
The strongest case for the platform, taken seriously
Now let me give the other side its due, because it has one. NHS England argues the FDP is delivering: Palantir says its software has helped deliver more than 110,000 additional operations and faster cancer diagnosis, and insists the company is a mere data processor. NHS England’s programme lead says patient data remains under NHS control at all times, and that the supplier cannot access, use or share it for its own purposes without breaking both the contract and the law. Waiting lists are a moral emergency. If a platform helps a single trust discharge patients faster, that is not nothing.
Grant all of it. Grant the safeguards, grant the benefits, grant the good faith of the NHS staff running the programme. The question still stands: why this company, and why on these terms? A tool can be useful and its custodian still be wrong. A Financial Times report has suggested the waiting list reductions attributed to the FDP are heavily driven by figures from a small number of hospitals, so even the headline benefits deserve colder scrutiny than they have received. And contracts, safeguards and ministerial assurances are only as durable as the next government’s intentions. Infrastructure outlasts the promises made at its ribbon-cutting.
The deeper point is this. The NHS runs on something no contract clause can manufacture: the willingness of ordinary people to tell the truth to their doctor. That willingness is public property. It should not be mortgaged to any private firm, least of all one whose fortune was built on watching people.
What should happen now
There is a door, and it is open. The initial three-year term of Palantir’s contract ends in March 2027, and NHS England is reviewing it this year to decide whether to extend, with the final decision resting with ministers. NHS England says the platform itself is “here to stay”. Fine. Keep the platform, if it works. Nobody in Sheffield voted against data. They voted against this steward. The government should decline the extension, retender the work, and build towards a publicly owned, transparent, UK-based operator with consent and opt-outs worthy of the name.
And the rest of us? Sheffield’s campaign was built by health workers, patients and residents over a year of organising, scrutiny hearings and town hall protests. Every council in England now has a template. Every trust board can be asked the same question Sheffield asked, in public, on the record.
The NHS was created by an act of collective trust in 1948. It will be defended the same way, city by city, if we choose.
Sheffield has chosen: the health service belongs to us, and so does our data.
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