Revealed: Britain's contracts with Palantir hit £1bn

The British state has spent or agreed to spend close to £1bn on contracts with Palantir Technologies since 2014, the Nerve can reveal. 

The total, just over £992m – compiled from new freedom of information disclosures, departmental spending records and contracts reported since January – is 48% higher than the £670m the Nerve first identified in an investigation at the start of the year. About £372m of the money has not yet been paid, and depends on two contracts running to their full value: the Ministry of Defence’s £240.6m deal, awarded in December 2025, and the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which could cost up to £330m if the government does not exercise a break clause next year.

The figures come as the prime minister, Andy Burnham, faces growing pressure to cut ties with the company co-founded by Peter Thiel. Labour members at the party’s conference this week have called on the government to end its Palantir contracts, and campaigners are holding a week of international protests against the firm.

Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “It’s increasingly clear the British state is in the early stages of addiction to Palantir and all it represents. We now have a chance to chart a new and better course away from Palantir. We should take it quickly, with both hands.”

This week the Financial Times reported that the government is looking for British alternatives to Palantir, including candidates to take over the FDP. 

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP, said the scale of spending “begs the question of why Palantir isn’t on the Cabinet Office’s strategic suppliers list”. He has asked the Commons public accounts committee to investigate.

In July, the government published the latest list, which featured 36 companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Vodafone. Each are assigned a Crown Representative who oversees their relationship with the government. Although there are no published criteria for inclusion on the list, it is assumed that annual receipts of over £100m is the threshold for inclusion. In the first two years of the FDP, spending on that alone was £198.4m, so it is unclear why Palantir is not on the list. In March, the Cabinet Office told Wrigley, in answer to a written question, that Palantir was not a strategic supplier and that there were no plans to make it one. 

The new findings include £196m of total Ministry of Defence (MoD) spending from April 2021 to 2026; £7.8m spent on Palantir software by the police; and fresh contracts with the Home Office, the National Energy System Operator and the Financial Conduct Authority. 

In January, the Nerve showed that Palantir's work reached into almost every part of the state, from local councils to the MoD, the NHS, police forces, the Cabinet Office, the Department of the Environmant and GCHQ, including previously unreported work on nuclear defence systems.

The largest share of spending on Palantir is with the MoD, which has maintained a relationship with the company since at least 2015. 

As previously reported by The Citizens, the ministry’s spending with Palantir between the years 2015-16 and 2020-21 totalled over £53.1m across various contracts and arms of the department. New information, obtained from the MoD via freedom of information (FOI) disclosures, reveals that since April 2021 the department has spent a further £196m on Palantir’s software. 

This includes a £75m enterprise agreement with Palantir, which ran between 2022 and 2025, for providing the Palantir “software tool-set to accommodate the UK MoD’s demand, at all security classifications, for the next three years in line with data strategies”.  

In addition, a new directly awarded £240.6m contract was given to the company in December 2025 for “data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across all classifications”, a contract spanning three years. This would bring the total awarded to Palantir by the MoD since 2015 to £489.7m. 

Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons science, innovation and technology committee, said they were “seeking answers from government as to why £240m of public money was awarded to Palantir in an MoD contract without a competitive tender process”.

Before the announcement of the new deal, then-prime minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s offices on a trip to Washington organised by the UK’s former ambassador, Peter Mandelson. Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, and Mandelson held shares in the firm. 

But Mandelson isn’t the only senior Labour politician with deep ties to the company. Last month, Labour peer Tom Watson joined Palantir as UK senior vice-president. Before taking a leave of absence from the Lords on joining the company, Watson had held advisory positions at both Palantir and Lodestone Oxford, a consultancy firm which had Palantir as a client in 2024.

Watson has become a vocal defender of the company, as pressure grows on Burnham from campaigners, parliamentary committees and MPs to halt contracts over its controversial work with the Israeli military in Gaza, and its work for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the US. Both Watson and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Mandelson’s co-founder at Global Counsel, attended the Labour conference this week.

In response to the findings, the Ministry of Defence told the Nerve: "There are robust processes in place to ensure government contracts are awarded fairly and transparently. All suppliers are subject to rigorous due diligence and must deliver value for money while complying with our security and legal obligations." 

Regarding the visit to Washington, Palantir said: “This was a typical government visit to a UK employer, organised in the usual way… there was no discussion of any future contract during the meeting that took place as part of the visit.” It added: “The defence secretary has stated categorically that Peter Mandelson had no influence on that contract.”

Although the MoD accounts for Palantir’s largest contracts, the NHS is where the company’s role is most contested. In January, the Nerve put the value of Palantir’s health service work at £244m, including – at that time – £182m for phase one of the FDP. 

New FOI disclosures from NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) show spending of £269m: £198.4m on the FDP by March 2026, £69m on other NHS work between 2020 and 2024, and nearly £2m at DHSC between 2020 and 2022. If the FDP runs to its £330m forecast, the health total since 2020 will exceed £401m. 

The NHS FDP contract has become a focus for opposition to Palantir’s work for the state. The platform represents the biggest challenge Palantir faces in maintaining its foothold in key national infrastructure, as the Burnham government faces a difficult decision in choosing whether to continue with Palantir’s contract and avoid a rupture with Washington, or move away from the FDP and make good on repeated promises to “buy British” and invest in sovereign technologies. 

Pressure has been mounting not just from campaigners, but also from cross-party groups of MPs, to ditch the FDP contract. 

The chairs of two Commons committees, from different parties, want the contract ended. In June, the science, innovation and technology committee called on the government to exercise the February 2027 break clause and either bring the work in-house or turn to UK providers, citing Palantir’s “clear mismatch with UK values”. Onwurah told the Nerve that the FDP contract had created “an unacceptable level of dependency” and crowded out British companies that could provide the same services. 

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the health and social care committee, told the Nerve there was “serious mistrust among both the medical profession and the general public” that could deter people from sharing their medical data. With other tools able to deliver similar benefits, she said, the government should be "actively seeking an alternative in time for spring 2027”.

Last month, James Firth, the health innovation minister, acknowledged the same risk, saying that he was worried that, in future, “mistrust” of the company could affect “people’s willingness to share data with the NHS”.

At the weekend, The Labour Party’s conference arrangement committee blocked an emergency motion brought by party delegates to discuss dropping Palantir from the NHS. 

The Telegraph reported that Louise Haigh, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, intimated at conference that Labour will ban Palantir from the NHS. Although no decision has been announced, it has also been reported that the government is looking at British alternatives to Palantir for both the NHS and MoD.

Palantir has also expanded its work with police forces. Previously known contracts tracked by the Nerve between Palantir and the police included the money awarded for the Bedfordshire and Leicestershire contracts, worth some £2.2m. 

Since then, forces are known to have spent at least £7.8m on Palantir, including trials and contract extensions, and with officers from multiple regional forces such as the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) and East Midlands Special Operations Unit (EMSOU) having access to data held on Palantir’s “real-time data sharing” tool Nectar, part of its Foundry software platform. Six forces are known to have spent money on Palantir trials and software; as many as 12 forces in the UK had officers with access to Nectar. 

Palantir is known to be in the running for a new national service for sharing local intelligence and police force data, known as the National Data Integration and Exploitation Service (NDIES). A pre-market tender published last year stated that NDIES was expected to cost between £75m and £250m – though this is still an active tender and not reflected in the £992m figure. 

However, recent developments also draw into doubt Palantir’s foothold in this space. Following the reporting into the extent of Palantir’s involvement with the police, five forces using Palantir’s Nectar – the ones within EMSOU (Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire) – are reported to be ending their trial with the software giant, citing “funding streams”. 

The EMSOU exit is a setback for Palantir, although ERSOU is still trialling the software and the Met has extended its internal monitoring contract. Lancashire police also ran a short pilot.

Earlier this year, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, blocked another £50m, two-year deal with the Metropolitan police that Palantir would have secured, citing a lack of proper procurement process with the Met. Palantir is suing the mayor’s office, with its lawyers claiming that the decision made by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime was "unlawful" because it took into consideration Palantir’s "values and ethics" when blocking the contract.

Many of Palantir’s previously known agreements have been in the public domain for some time, though some ran over the cost value originally reported. The company has also been involved in a number of consortium agreements, its share of which has now been uncovered by the Nerve through FOI disclosures.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)) issued Palantir a contract to help build a case management system for Ukrainian humanitarian relief as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme in 2022, for an initial cost of £0, as well as a £4.5m contract to provide the Foundry platform for the department. 

Information obtained under FOI from the department reveals that total spending on these agreements up to March 2026 had run up to £18.6m, also accounting for two contract extensions. MHCLG has now moved to a different system, and after replacing Palantir a department spokesperson said the department had saved “millions”, and the new system was "more flexible" and could meet "high standards" of security. 

The Cabinet Office has worked with Palantir too, to build a £27m post-Brexit “border flow tool”. Scrutiny of departmental spending records indicate it spent £27.9m on Palantir software in total. In 2024, it was reported that the government had pulled the plug on the project because of “budget pressures”, instead opting to develop an “in-house model”. 

The company has, as far as is currently known, held two agreements, years apart, with local council authorities; first in Sunderland, where they built the authority an “intelligence hub” between 2014 and 2019, costing £4.5m. More recently, Coventry council entered into an agreement to provide a “strategic AI platform” at an initial cost of £500,000. 

As previously reported by the Nerve and confirmed via FOI disclosures, the authority then extended its agreement with Palantir at a 50% higher cost of £750,000. 

In addition to contracts previously reported by the Nerve in January, Palantir has subsequently been awarded more work by a variety of departments. The UK’s energy operator, the National Energy System Operator, recently awarded it a £21.2m contract without competition.

The company has also recently been awarded a further £9m to provide software managing firearms licensing across the UK, also handling Home Office licensing for explosives, explosive precursors, and poisons. 

These latest disclosures come at the end of a week of “People v Palantir” protests taking place across Europe, the Americas, Australia and the UK, focused on the company’s work with ICE and the Israeli military. In England the focus was on the FDP. 

Campaign groups including Medact, Amnesty International, Just Treatment, Health Workers for a Free Palestine, Global Justice Now, Keep Our NHS Public and Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK have held a series of health-worker-led events throughout the week, ending with a rally held outside Palantir’s London HQ in Soho Square on Thursday evening, and protests at locations across the country, demanding an end to all government contracts with the company.

A spokesperson for Medact and the No Palantir in the NHS campaign said: “Given that Palantir’s software services are mainly used for war, surveillance and deportation, it is deeply disturbing to see how much the UK has contracted them in recent years, and speaks to the slide into authoritarianism as Big Tech and governments collaborate more and more.”

“The government has a choice,” they said, “whether to continue with Palantir’s unethical and inefficient tech, or choose to reinvest in public sector innovation and NHS-led data architecture.”

Wrigley said Watson, who joined Palantir last month, would “have his job cut out to rescue the reputation of a company that isn’t as good as it thinks it is”.