NHS, National Health Service. Credit: chrisdorney via Shutterstock.com The UK minister responsible for health innovation has told MPs that public mistrust of Palantir is making patients less willing to hand their medical records to the NHS, and that the number of people formally opting out of data sharing has risen by roughly 60,000 over four months. The admission sits in a letter from James Frith, parliamentary under-secretary of state for health innovation, to Layla Moran, who chairs the Commons Health and Social Care Committee. The committee published the letter on 2 September.
Its contents were reported by the Guardian on Sunday, which drew out what the opt-out rise means for medical research. “I am concerned about mistrust of Palantir, and the impact it could have on people’s willingness to share data with the NHS,” Frith wrote, adding that it was also eroding health professionals’ support for the platform. He went further on the consequences, telling Moran that “it may not be possible to realise the benefits of the 10 Year Health Plan if patients stop sharing their data”. The letter, dated 21 August, sets out the numbers the minister is working from. Frith describes a small spike of about 20,000 national data opt-outs when the Federated Data Platform was announced in 2023, and a further rise of about 60,000 over the past four months, which he attributes to increased media interest rather than to anything the programme itself has done.
He offers a yardstick that cuts both ways. In 2021, the GP Data for Planning and Research scheme pushed the national opt-out rate above 5% of the population, up from below 1%. Measured against England’s population of roughly 57 million, the recent increase of 60,000 works out at about 0.1%, which is why the department can call it small. It is also the largest movement since the platform was announced, and it is moving in one direction.
The national data opt-out is not a refusal of treatment. It blocks a person’s confidential patient information from being used for planning and research beyond their own care, which is precisely the pool that clinical researchers and public health teams draw on. Every registered opt-out narrows that dataset a little, and the effect is cumulative and difficult to reverse. Frith was writing in response to the committee’s July report, which told the government to drop the platform when the contract’s break clause arrives in February 2027 and to start looking for an alternative.
Moran said at the time that it was “time to crack on with preparations to find an alternative in time for spring 2027”. TNW covered the committee’s intervention and the government’s subsequent review of the £330mn deal. Most of the letter is a defence. Frith tells Moran the NHS is not locked into Palantir, since it owns the intellectual property in the data models and the products built on the platform, and could migrate them elsewhere.
Three engineers employed by Palantir hold administrative-level access for back-office technical support, he writes, and have no permission to use the data for their own purposes. An independent evaluation is running at Imperial College London, the National Audit Office is reviewing the programme, and the Office for Statistics Regulation found no defects serious enough to require NHS England to withdraw its published evidence on the platform’s value. On timing, the minister is less reassuring. The commercial and legal assessment is due to complete in the autumn, and Frith warns that if it concludes a successor contract is needed, standard government procurement timelines make it unlikely one could be in place by March.
That leaves the department arguing two things at once: that the opt-out numbers are small enough not to worry about, and that they are rising because of who the supplier is. The second of those is the only variable a procurement decision can actually change.
