NHS faces legal challenge over Palantir contract

Lawsuit claims that NHS England failed to do an impact assessment before handling a new two-year contract to Palantir

The NHS is facing a legal challenge over its decision to award a new £23.5m data contract to the controversial US data mining firm Palantir Technologies.

Open Democracy announced on Wednesday that it had brought the legal case against the NHS over Palantir's long-term involvement in the analysis of public health data.

The lawsuit claims that NHS England failed to do an impact assessment when it handed a two-year contract to Palantir in December.

Palantir is a data firm founded in 2003 with the support from the CIA. The firm helps organisations in analysing big volumes of data from governments and other sources to get valuable patterns and insights.

Palantir has been known for supporting the CIA's intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In recent years, the firm has faced criticism from civil rights groups in the US for providing its software to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track down illegal immigrants.

Palantir's involvement in the NHS work began in March last year, when the authorities awarded it a short-term contract to develop a data platform to help deploy resources in response to Covid-19.

The initial contract involved Palantir's Foundry software being used to power the NHS's 'datastore' of health information related to the pandemic. The NHS said at the time that all the data collected "will only be used for Covid-19" and that "only relevant information will be collected."

In June, the government released details of multiple data deals it had signed with Palantir, Microsoft, Google and UK-based AI firm Faculty, which has links to Dominic Cummings.

Open Democracy, a media group owned by the not-for-profit Open Democracy Foundation, claim that as part of the government contracts Faculty and Palantir were granted certain intellectual property (IP) rights and that the firms were allowed to make profit from their access to the NHS data.

In December, NHS England struck a new two-year, £23.5 million contract with Palantir to provide the NHS with "data management platform services".

Open Democracy is critical of the new contract, arguing that this contract "reaches far beyond Covid: to Brexit, general business planning and much more" and could demolish trust in the NHS.

The group claims that the government has failed to provide information about its data contracts or to explain the access that different technology companies have to NHS data.

"The government shouldn't use the pandemic as an excuse to embed major tech firms like Palantir in the NHS without consulting the public," said Cori Crider, director and co-founder of Foxglove.

In a statement to the BBC, an NHS spokesperson said that an assessment of the Palantir contract had been performed in April, and that NHS will publish an update in due course.

Foxglove, the not-for-profit legal group which works to make technology fair and which is handling the legal case for Open Democracy, said any new contract with Palantir needed a fresh impact assessment.

"We believe that we, the public, should have a say about these lucrative deals before they happen, not after," Open Democracy stated.

Foxglove and Open Democracy are crowdfunding for £30,000 to meet the costs of the legal challenge.

"We must act now to stop government secrecy around these massive deals - and to make sure our personal health information and privacy rights are protected," the group said. "'Covid cronyism' and secrecy must end."