A local exception in a national programme

Greater Manchester has emerged as the clearest institutional exception to England’s drive to deploy the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), the data and workflow programme led by US software company Palantir. The disagreement is not simply a dispute over technology. It brings together questions of clinical usefulness, public legitimacy, procurement resilience and the extent to which the NHS should rely on a single overseas supplier for critical digital infrastructure.

The FDP was commissioned to address a longstanding problem: health and care services hold information in many incompatible systems, making it difficult for staff to coordinate treatment, manage waiting lists, plan operating theatres or understand demand across a region. The programme aims to make authorised data easier for NHS staff to use within secure environments, while allowing locally developed tools to be shared more widely.

NHS England says the platform was live in 139 trusts and 35 integrated care boards as of the end of May 2026. That scale gives the programme considerable momentum. But usage figures alone do not settle the central question raised by Greater Manchester: whether a nationally supplied platform is necessarily the best solution for every part of a devolved and highly varied health service.

Greater Manchester’s alternative

The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board has developed its own Analytics and Data Science Platform, known as ADSP, over several years. Its leadership argues that this locally assembled system already meets its needs as a strategic commissioner and population-health body, including work that combines primary-care information with other local datasets.

In a May 2025 board paper, the organisation said its existing capability exceeded what the FDP then offered and that some functions in use locally were still years away from being fully operational in the national environment. It also stressed that the local platform rested on trust built with residents, clinicians and data controllers over a long period.

That stance should not be mistaken for a blanket technological boycott. Greater Manchester agreed to a minimal onboarding step that allowed it to engage with the national programme, but it retained conditions on deeper adoption. Notably, it said it would not transfer locally held GP data from ADSP into the FDP, describing duplication, resource demands and local objections as reasons for caution.

The distinction matters. The dispute is about the role of the FDP in a regional system, rather than a claim that every hospital or trust in Greater Manchester must avoid it. Hospital organisations and integrated care boards have different responsibilities and require different forms of data infrastructure. A platform useful for theatre scheduling or discharge coordination in an acute trust may not automatically replace a mature regional analytics system used for commissioning and prevention.

Trust is part of operational capacity

Greater Manchester’s position is based on an important practical argument: public confidence is not a peripheral communications issue but a condition of successful data use. Health-data programmes need legal safeguards, technical controls and clearly limited purposes, but they also need patients and staff to believe those safeguards are meaningful.

Palantir maintains that it supplies software rather than owning or exploiting NHS patient data, and NHS England says data controllers decide how information is used and who may access it. The company and its supporters also point to practical gains reported by NHS organisations using FDP products, including improved waiting-list management, theatre utilisation and care coordination.

Yet the company’s wider public profile has made this assurance harder to communicate. Palantir’s work with defence, security and immigration agencies, particularly in the United States, has attracted sustained criticism. For opponents, the concern is not only whether a particular NHS deployment meets data-protection rules. It is whether an organisation associated with those activities can command sufficient social licence to sit at the centre of a public health system founded on universal care.

That is why Greater Manchester’s objection cannot be reduced to symbolism. If staff are reluctant to use a system or if patients fear that sensitive records may be handled in ways they do not understand, implementation becomes more difficult and the anticipated benefits may not materialise. Equally, reputational concern alone does not demonstrate that the FDP is technically unsafe or clinically ineffective. The challenge for decision-makers is to assess both propositions rather than treating either as decisive by itself.

The national contract decision

Palantir’s consortium won the FDP contract in November 2023, with the programme formally beginning in March 2024. The contract has a potential seven-year duration, but NHS England committed initially to three years. The first term ends in March 2027; it can be extended by two years and then by further one-year periods, up to March 2031.

This structure turns late 2026 into a consequential period. Parliamentary evidence in June indicated that the NHS would need to notify the supplier by December 2026 if it did not intend to continue after the initial term, while officials said they aimed to reach a view earlier in the autumn.

A cross-party parliamentary committee has urged the government to use the February 2027 break point and publish a fully costed exit plan, arguing that growing reliance on Palantir creates an unacceptable weakness. The committee’s concern was not framed as a claim that the company’s products do not work. Rather, it focused on vendor lock-in, national resilience, transparency and the availability of domestic alternatives.

Those arguments deserve attention, particularly because public-sector data platforms can become difficult and expensive to replace once workflows, training and software integrations accumulate around them. However, an exit would not be costless. Any replacement strategy would need to preserve continuity for organisations already using the platform, protect clinical services during migration and demonstrate that alternatives can operate at national scale.

What the Manchester case does and does not prove

Greater Manchester is evidence that the NHS does not start from a blank page. It has developed a substantial local data capability and claims measurable benefits from data-led preventive programmes. Its experience weakens the assertion that Palantir is the only plausible route to modern, joined-up health analytics.

It does not, on its own, establish that one regional platform can replace every function of the FDP across England. Its system has evolved for a particular place, governance structure and set of data relationships. Reproducing that model elsewhere would require investment, skilled teams and local institutional trust; these are not products that can be purchased instantly.

The more useful lesson is that NHS digital strategy should avoid a false choice between fragmented local improvisation and permanent dependence on one supplier. National standards for interoperability, security and reusable tools can coexist with locally accountable platforms. Contractual arrangements should make data portable, prevent proprietary lock-in and allow NHS bodies to change components without rebuilding their entire digital estate.

Greater Manchester’s refusal to fully adopt the FDP is therefore less a rejection of data-driven healthcare than a demand for greater control over how it is delivered. The decision on Palantir’s contract will show whether the NHS can translate that demand into a credible national strategy: one that improves care while maintaining public trust and preserving the ability to choose its own technological future.

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