Palantir NHS objections make patient consent an operating risk

More than 44,000 people have filed legal objections to prevent the NHS from using their health records on a data platform powered by Palantir. The objections, coordinated by the not-for-profit 38 Degrees, call on NHS England to stop sharing, storing or processing those individuals' data through the Federated Data Platform, invoking Article 21 of the UK GDPRGDPREU regulation governing how organizations collect, store and use personal data, with fines tied to global revenue for breaches.View full definition →, the right to object to processing. Under Article 21, an organisation must stop processing unless it can show compelling legitimate grounds to continue, and objectors also asked the NHS to pause processing while the requests are weighed, according to the Guardian's Robert Booth.

The timing is the point. A cross-party group of MPs told the government to start planning for life after Palantir, with the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee telling the Department of Health and Social Care to prepare to replace the FDP when the contract reaches its break clause in February 2027, according to The Register. That clause would let NHS England exit by the end of March 2027, per Digital Health.

What is contested is whether the platform works. Palantir says the platform helped NHS trusts deliver 117,000 additional operations, cut long-stay discharge delays by 14.3% and improve 28-day cancer diagnosis rates by 5.6%, according to Computing. Those figures drew scrutiny from the Office for Statistics Regulation, which urged NHS England to communicate benefits more carefully; NHS England added a caveat on 6 June acknowledging it could not establish a direct causal link because other variables had not been controlled for. Freedom of Information data obtained by Foxglove found 41 trusts using the Inpatient scheduling module, of which 13 reported fewer operations overall, while Chelsea and Westminster accounted for 183,061 of 217,846 outpatient waiting list removals, The Register reported.

NHS England said it would respond to the objections under data protection law and that all NHS organisations remain in control of their data within the FDP, with suppliers unable to access it for their own purposes.

Watch three things: how NHS England answers tens of thousands of individual objections, whether ministers trigger the February 2027 clause, and whether patient opt-outs start degrading the data itself. At a scrutiny meeting reported on 2 October, medical professionals warned councillors that patients may opt out of data sharing and care, which harms research, service planning and individual safety.