Greater Manchester Is Holding Out Against Palantir’s NHS Platform

Greater Manchester’s health care board is the lone regional holdout against Palantir’s Federated Data Platform, choosing a locally built system instead. Its stance now sits at the center of a six-month decision over whether the UK government will keep or end Palantir’s NHS contract before its planned 2031 expiry.

A shared foundation for local health tools

The UK commissioned Palantir in 2023 to build the Federated Data Platform, and the NHS began rolling it out in early 2024. The system is designed to organize health data across the service: a national data pool is meant to identify care gaps, while local organizations can analyze data and build tools for needs such as waitlist management and discharge planning.

For decades, NHS workers have relied on a mix of digital systems, spreadsheets, paper, and whiteboards. When records do not follow a patient between care settings, care providers can lack the information needed to coordinate treatment, while administrators make funding and resource decisions from incomplete data.

The intended advantage is reuse. Because national and local components share a technology foundation, a tool developed in one part of England could, in theory, be adopted elsewhere. The platform is also positioned as a common surface for AI work across NHS data, according to Tom Bartlett, who previously oversaw the national FDP rollout as NHS England’s deputy director of data engineering.

The two NHS users the platform is built for

• NHS trusts, which run hospitals and local care, can use the FDP in delivering treatment and managing operations.
• Integrated care boards, which plan and commission services for regions, can use it for their distinct planning and resource-allocation work.

The exception has its own platform

Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, which covers about 3 million people, has repeatedly declined to adopt the FDP and continues using its Analytics and Data Science Platform, or ADSP. In May 2025, the board said its local capability exceeded what the FDP offered and that some functions were two to three years ahead.

The board’s argument is partly technical and partly about legitimacy. Greater Manchester says its platform receives primary-care data unavailable on Palantir’s system, can be reconfigured because it is a collection of technologies rather than a single fixed product, and has built public trust over years. Those are claims from the board, not an independently established comparison of clinical or financial results.

A disagreement over what counts as an alternative

Palantir disputes Greater Manchester’s claim to superior results. The company says there is little independent evidence that ADSP has directly improved patient care or saved money, and says thousands of NHS staff use and trust the FDP. Bartlett makes a narrower objection: he says ADSP and FDP serve different roles, so judging the national platform solely against a care board’s analytics system misstates the FDP’s purpose.

That distinction matters to the pending contract choice. Proponents say no viable replacement can connect the NHS’s trusts, care boards, and national bodies at the same scale, and warn an early exit would reverse progress. Greater Manchester’s data chief, Matt Hennessey, has said the board only claims superiority in a care-board setting, not across the entire NHS.

The contract decision has become a sovereignty argument

The NHS-Palantir deal is worth more than $400 million, and the government has six months to decide whether to use its break clause. Politicians and parliamentary committees have urged it to do so, arguing that reliance on one foreign vendor gives that supplier too much leverage and that the UK should seek domestic alternatives.

Public confidence is the unresolved constraint connecting the local and national disputes. Greater Manchester said in April that it had not started a scheduled FDP review because public concerns had intensified. Whether the government treats the board as proof that an alternative exists, or as a specialized system that cannot replace national infrastructure, will shape the next phase of the NHS’s data strategy.