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| Volume 56 Number 15, May 16, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
For more than two decades, successive governments - Labour, Coalition, Conservative and now Labour again - have pursued the same structural goal with patient data for the NHS. They have refused to support and invest in the public data services at Hospital Trusts and GPs that have struggled against all the odds to maintain patient data for hospital and community services whilst instead these governments have spent billions of pounds to outsource this core infrastructure to private consortia many of whom have failed to deliver any data services at all.
In 2002, the then Labour government handed over the NHS IT system National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) to the private sector companies like BT, CSC/DXC, Fujitsu, Accenture, Atos, Cerner, iSoft and TPP. The contract went from £6.2 billion previously agreed to more than £10 billion over 10 years. In 2006, during this period, many of the private consortia demanded massive payments for alleged breach of contract by NHS Trusts. These Trusts had been put in the impossible situation of not wanting to hand over to the private IT companies their hard-pressed IT workers. These highly skilled workers were working on present working IT systems for their patients. To transfer these staff to systems that were not working would destroy their own services. The so-called aim of NPfIT was to be a single national electronic patient record, a central "spine", with standardised systems across all NHS Trusts. What happened instead was a slow-motion collapse that took nearly a decade. It cost the public treasury more than £10 billion without delivering a byte of central "spine" data.
In 2010, Atos was made the prime contractor responsible for delivering the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) system under NHS Digital's predecessor Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). GPES was the NHS system designed to extract coded data from GP practices for payments, planning, surveillance and analysis. Atos was responsible for the core extraction software, the interface with GP clinical IT systems and the delivery of the extraction engine. In 2015, the National Audit Office (NAO) condemned the contract as being over three years late, as being over-budget with a cost of over £40 million, and as "not fit for purpose"; only one extraction worked and then the system was abandoned as one of the largest failures in IT history.
The names have changed - BT, CSC, Fujitsu, Atos, and now Palantir. The branding of the data has changed - NPfIT, care.data, Covid Data Store, and now the Federated Data Platform (FDP). Palantir's involvement with NHS data originated in March 2020 via an initial emergency contract to build a COVID-19 data store. While this trial was valued at £1, follow-on contracts in late 2020 and later extensions raised the company's Covid-related payments to top £60 million. The massive seven-year contract to build the FDP was awarded to a consortium in 2023 led by Palantir Technologies FDP without open competition. Next Palantir was awarded a "transition" contract in 2023 of £25 million and then a full contract signed by the previous government estimated to be from £330-£480 million.
The result is a 24-year cycle of billion-pound contracts(see data table above), and complete technical failures of these companies to provide this service, yet still walking away with these billions of pounds of NHS funding. The response has been the huge opposition to the outsourcing of patient data to these private data consortiums. Movements of the people have grown, refusing to let their health records be handed over by GPs and hospitals worried that the data would reach private insurance companies and government agencies such as the Department of Social Security, and so on. This has culminated in the mass opposition to the current FDP which is being rolled out today by the government.