More than 44,000 people have filed legal objections asking NHS England to stop Palantir from sharing, storing or using their health records. It is one of the largest single waves of data-rights objections ever directed at a piece of the health service’s software, and it lands while the contract that put Palantir inside the NHS can still be unwound.
The objections were coordinated by 38 Degrees, a nonprofit campaign group, and invoke the right to object under article 21 of the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Under that provision, NHS England must stop using the data unless it can show a compelling reason to continue. The objectors have also asked that the health service halt all processing of their records through the platform while their main request is assessed.
Veronica Hawking, the campaigns director at 38 Degrees, said the scale of the response should jolt ministers. “The scale of this public backlash should be a huge wake-up call for the government,” she said. The filings themselves put the matter in plain terms, with signatories saying the involvement of the American company undermines their personal trust in NHS data confidentiality.
NHS England pushed back in a statement. “All NHS organisations remain in control of their data within the FDP, with suppliers unable to access it for their own purposes, and we will respond to the objection requests in line with data protection law,” a spokesperson said. Palantir has said its handling of patient data is carried out only on the NHS’s instructions and that the data remains in the United Kingdom.
The platform at issue is the Federated Data Platform, or FDP, which Palantir has supplied to NHS England under a seven-year contract signed in November 2023 worth up to 330 million pounds. The deal was sold as a way to connect the health service’s scattered data on surgery schedules, discharge planning and bed capacity. It also contained exit clauses that take effect in February 2027, which means the contract can still be ended relatively soon.
That deadline is why the objection wave matters beyond its numbers. Two House of Commons select committees have urged the government to exercise the break clause, and a decision on whether to back or scrap the deal is expected within months. The objections give the health service a legal obligation to respond to each filer individually, a burden that grows with every signature.
The opposition has been gathering for years, not weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed petitions demanding the deal be cancelled, and the health service’s own chief executive, Jim Mackey, has acknowledged that the benefits of the platform to public health may not be as large as originally claimed. The terms of the debate, in other words, have moved from whether Palantir’s software works to whether it should be there at all.
The anger is not purely about data governance. Palantir’s work for the Israeli military and for the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has turned the NHS contract into a political flashpoint. Earlier in the week, Amnesty International and the patient group Just Treatment parked a van styled like a shot-up ambulance outside Palantir’s London office, asking why a company tied to the destruction of Gaza’s health system should have any place in Britain’s.
Palantir has defended the platform with its own figures. A company spokesperson said trusts using the software have recorded 117,000 additional operations, a 14.3 percent reduction in discharge delays for long-stay patients and a 5.6 percent improvement in the share of people learning whether they have cancer within 28 days. Louis Mosley, its executive vice president for the UK and Europe, has dismissed critics as suffering from what he calls “Palantir derangement syndrome.”
The standoff is a test of a wider question: who gets to say no when a government wires its health data into a foreign technology company. Data-protection law was written for consent and correction, not as a veto over public procurement, and yet that is how it is now being used. The objections are an attempt to turn an individual legal right into a collective brake on a contract, and no British public body has handled an exercise of this size before.
For NHS England, the practical problem is immediate. Each objection must be answered, and if the health service cannot demonstrate a compelling reason to keep processing a given patient’s data, it must stop. Multiplied across tens of thousands of people, that creates the possibility that parts of the platform simply run with holes in the data they were built to join up.
Palantir and the government both insist the platform is delivering. What the objection wave shows is that a meaningful share of the public does not care about the operational gains until it trusts the company holding the records. The break clause in February 2027 gives that distrust a date.
