As part of the campaign, I emailed Yvette Cooper, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, about an Organise petition. Part of the campaign was to write to Yvette Cooper. Here is the standard email with my addition asking for Lord Watson to be stripped of his peerage. When will the politicians clean up and put their house in order? They make the Augean stables look like a breath of fresh air.
“I’m one of more than 215,000 people who have signed petitions asking you to end Palantir’s NHS contract, handed in at Downing Street by NHS workers, MPs from three parties and a coalition of Organise, WeMove Europe, Ekō, Amnesty International and Global Justice Now.
I’m writing about reports that you plan to extend the Palantir NHS contract by 2 years – instead of terminating it as NHS staff and the public demand.
Lord Watson – ex-Labour deputy leader – joined Palantir as a Senior Vice President – a full-time position. We don’t know how much he earned when he was in a part-time position at Palantir from 2024. As – wait for it – under the House of Lords rules, peers are only required to register the existence of a commercial interest or advisory role; they are not legally obligated to publish the exact monetary value or salary of their earnings (unlike the House of Commons register for MPs)
The British state has now spent £1 billion on contracts with US spy tech giant Palantir – and the figure keeps climbing.
Palantir, despite securing an estimated £670 million of UK public sector contracts, including major NHS and Ministry of Defence agreements, Palantir’s UK subsidiary reported only £25.3 million of pre-tax profit in 2024 and paid around £2.1 million in corporation tax, an effective rate of roughly 8%, compared with the UK’s headline corporation tax rate of 25%. This is another sound reason for not renewing their contract
Palantir’s technology helps power Donald Trump’s deportation drive, and it has a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence. I don’t believe a company with that record should sit at the heart of our NHS’s data.
In an anonymous survey of over 680 NHS workers, 98% said the government should end the contract, and 96% said they don’t trust Palantir to handle patient data responsibly. It is time to terminate the contract and get Palantir out of our NHS.
I would be grateful if you could:
*Use the February break clause and end Palantir’s contract in 2027.
*Use the contract’s transition period to move away safely.
*Build a replacement the NHS owns, designed with NHS staff, patients and data privacy experts.
More than 215,000 people, NHS staff and MPs from three parties have asked you to act. I’m asking too. I am also asking that Lord Watson be stripped of his peerage.”