Experts have welcomed the UK government's decision to review its contract with Palantir to provide software central to tackling the elective care backlog. The US spy-tech biz has, for some, been a controversial presence at the heart of the National Health Service in England since it was awarded a contract for just £1 to help provide data tools during the pandemic. It later won £60 million in uncontested deals. After the pandemic, it won a £330 million award – with other companies as partners – to provide the Federated Data Platform (FDP) under a SaaS model for the former Conservative government. NHS England defended the decision to award the FDP contract to Palantir after a competitive tender, saying it would help provide increased productivity necessary to help the NHS recover from its mammoth post-pandemic elective care backlog. Since Labour took office, however, the Palantir deal has looked less comfortable. The company was founded with backing from CIA-linked venture capital firm In-Q-Tel and provides technology to ICE and other controversial US security agencies. Attention has begun to focus on a contractual break clause next February, with the UK government saying it is planning to review the contract. Lord Paul Drayson, a member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, welcomed the decision to review the contract. Speaking at the Digital and AI Sovereignty event organized by open source advocates OpenUK last week, he claimed the decision to appoint Palantir to the NHS England deal did not meet the standards of clear rules and fair deals. "The issues relating to values really go to the heart of it. It's great there's being a review. The UK has the technology to do federated data platforms, and it's an example of the shift in the politics that's taking place," said Drayson, founder and former CEO of UK clinical AI and digital healthcare company Arcturis Data. Palantir said the results of its technology in the NHS were already evident as 110,078 additional patients have undergone procedures in hospital theatres since the FDP product was implemented. Nearly 7 percent more patients with referrals for suspected cancer were now receiving answers within 28 days compared to the 12 months before FDP, it said. However, experts at the OpenUK event expressed concern that the decision to give Palantir the FDP deal reflected poor decisions in shaping the UK tech market and poor stewardship of NHS data as a UK asset. Mike Bracken, partner at consultancy Public Digital and former Cabinet Office executive director for digital, said NHS England had a 15-year history of failing to set a standard health data taxonomy and classification in order to develop a thriving supply market. "That was the complete failure of NHSE," Bracken said. "We've heard talk about market shaping. Where we are now is a 15-year failure to shape a market around common standards and platforms. It really is not difficult. We're in a current position where the absence of doing that allows any single entity or company to own that taxonomy and that federated model that is not healthy for this country." "It is not actually about Palantir. If you look around our public sector, our officials believe in market orthodoxy, and our markets are little short of oligopolies and monopolies, and this is just another example. If we generally want market activity, competition, innovation, you have to create markets. You do not create markets by handing single control of federated platforms, in this case, to single companies, Palantir or otherwise." Secretary of State for Health and Social Care James Murray was asked about the FDP during a recent interview on BBC Radio 4's Today program. "The FDP is a single contract with Palantir, and it's being reviewed at the moment ahead of its breakpoint next year," he said. Speaking at the OpenUK meeting, Laura Gilbert, Senior Director for AI at the Tony Blair Institute and former director of data science in the Prime Minister's Office, said the FDP was exactly the use case that you don't outsource, and certainly not outside the country. The UK has the skills to build its own NHS data systems, which could lead to benefits for the wider tech and healthcare economy, she said. "Locking down to a single vendor is clearly risky when it is something so important. Once again you're in a place where you are not just giving the money away offshore but the benefit of the data – some going back to the patient, which is great – but we should be learning from that data and building a better health service, not allowing an offshore company to learn and build better products they can sell to somebody else." The Tony Blair Institute has received funding from Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, which was part of one of the losing FDP bids. The next few months will be critical for Palantir's involvement in the NHS. With the writing on the wall for UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, frontrunner to replace him is Andy Burnham, currently the mayor of Manchester. The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board has rejected the FDP, preferring to use the system it built on Microsoft Azure with technology from data pipeline vendor Matillion, analytics and data lake company Snowflake, data visualization firm Tableau, University of Manchester's eLab, and others. A report last year claimed it "exceeds anything the FDP currently offers." ®

The UK government has set up an advisory board for its digital ID project, intended "to challenge the government on emerging ideas or policy decisions to ensure the system works for everyone," says the Cabinet Office. The board includes David Rogers, an Internet of Things security expert and CEO of security consultancy Copper Horse. He is no stranger to government advisory panels, having previously sat on a group formed in 2020 to consider telecoms diversification. A year later, as chairman of the GSMA's fraud and security group, he backed the then-Conservative government's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022. Rogers has provided El Reg with comments over the years, and in 2014 discussed iPhone 6 biometric security, arguing that better usability would cut data loss overall because most people found PIN locks too cumbersome. Justine Roberts, founder and chief executive of UK parenting forum Mumsnet, is also on the board. The site experienced a data breach in 2019 due to a cloud migration affecting 46 user accounts, leading Roberts to apologize. More recently, some Mumsnet posters have been unimpressed by the government's digital ID plans, with one responding to the prime minister's October 2025 announcement with "Honestly, who is he kidding?" and "Desperate stuff to justify this authoritative bs." During the public consultation, some posters promoted the Sex Matters campaign to let Brits include their sex in their digital IDs. Another board member, Victor Dominello, has relevant experience as the minister who launched New South Wales' digital driver's license in 2019, saying it was more secure than the physical equivalent. In 2022, a researcher at security company Dvuln found numerous security flaws in the Service NSW app that hosts the license and other government services, although the state government said these did not pose a risk to customer information. Other members include John Fallon, former chief executive of Pearson and the lead non-executive board member of the Cabinet Office; Anne-Marie Imafidon, who runs social enterprise Stemettes, which encourages people to consider jobs in tech and science; and digital regulation lawyer Emma Wright. The board will meet quarterly for as long as the digital ID program lasts. The government is also setting up engagement exercises with the digital verification and financial services sectors. It is currently running a People's Panel with around 100 to 120 participants meeting in Birmingham and on Zoom to hear from experts and ministers before producing recommendations, in return for £550 in cash or vouchers. ®

National Savings & Investments (NS&I) is looking for a new chief executive to take charge of the state-backed savings institution as it attempts to steer a troubled £3 billion digital transformation program back on course. The government-owned bank has launched a search for a permanent successor to former chief executive Dax Harkins, who left earlier this year amid a scandal involving hundreds of millions of pounds in unclaimed funds owed to the estates of deceased customers. Whoever takes the job will get a salary of up to £220,000, a troubled digital transformation program, and what could be described as a challenging in-tray. While the recruitment notice highlights NS&I's 164-year history and its 24 million customers, it also acknowledges that the organization is wrestling with problems that extend well beyond attracting deposits. "Whilst NS&I is successfully meeting its targets for savings and funding for the Government, and service levels to most customers, it is undergoing a major transformation programme and has experienced significant operational failings recently," the job ad states. The successful candidate will take responsibility for Project Rainbow, NS&I's long-running modernization effort that Parliament's Public Accounts Committee tore into earlier this year. In February, MPs branded the program a "full-spectrum disaster" after costs ballooned from an original estimate of around £1.7 billion to approximately £3 billion. The committee concluded that NS&I lacked the capability to deliver the overhaul, had spent £43 million on consultants, and still did not have a credible integrated plan despite five years of work. MPs also questioned how a program originally expected to cost around £1.7 billion had risen to £3 billion while key elements remained unfinished. The new boss will be expected to turn that around. The advert promises "end-to-end accountability for transformation and performance of the organisation," handing the next chief exec responsibility for delivering a program that has already attracted intense scrutiny from Parliament. NS&I is also placing unusual emphasis on crisis management. Candidates are expected to demonstrate experience delivering "a major change/transformation programme within consumer facing industries, at scale," alongside a track record of managing operational issues, reputation management, and recovery. The advert goes further, stating it is "crucial that a highly capable, credible CEO is appointed to lead the organisation through these challenges and re-establish NS&I's reputation and standing as a trusted, efficient and effective national institution." Whoever lands the job will be tasked with proving that one of the government's most heavily criticized IT overhauls can still be rescued before Parliament decides the next chapter of Project Rainbow deserves an equally colorful nickname. ®