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We’ve won our lawsuit over Matt Hancock’s £23m NHS data deal with Palantir

We shouldn’t have had to go to court. For a year, we’ve been fighting legal battles over the British government’s secretive NHS data deals with controversial ‘spy tech’ firm Palantir.

Today, we can announce an important victory.

Back in December, after we had spent months on legal efforts to get transparency, the government snuck through a massive £23m, two-year deal with Palantir, a CIA-backed data firm. They contracted Palantir to process our sensitive health data.

We raised objections: the initial deals were framed as a short-term, emergency COVID response, but the new contract revealed mission creep well beyond the pandemic.

Government lawyers insisted that citizens have no right to a say in major NHS contracts with big tech. But we believed the public does have those rights. So we sued.

Facing our lawsuit, the government has finally caved. They’ve pressed pause, committing not to extend Palantir’s contract beyond COVID without consulting the public. There will be no more mission creep without assessing our rights. They have also agreed to engage the public, via patient juries, about whether firms like Palantir are appropriate for a long-term role in the NHS at all.

It’s a major U-turn at a critical moment. The NHS, with its unique trove of structured health data, is powerfully attractive to tech corporations. Palantir and other US tech firms clearly stand to profit from managing or accessing this asset, estimated to be worth £10bn a year.

The NHS datastore is the largest pool of private health data in NHS history, and that raises questions too important to be settled in secret deals. Should it survive the pandemic? On what terms? Should Palantir manage it, or are there more trustworthy alternatives?

Our fight has been about trust. Palantir was founded by a Trump-backing billionaire called Peter Thiel. The firm has a deep and controversial history with US police, and has recently landed a new contract supporting UK border enforcement.

Amid concerns over COVID vaccine hesitancy in some Black and minority ethnic communities and among migrants, trust in health services is vital. A long-term role for Palantir in the NHS risks eroding trust in key communities right when the government needs it most.

There are many more battles to fight. We still need full transparency on the Palantir deal: the government continues to refuse to lift key redactions on what data is being fed into Palantir’s datastore. We need to know that the public consultation they’ve promised is far-reaching, not just a box-ticking exercise.

We also need to fully understand and debate Matt Hancock’s long-term plans for our NHS. Our case was launched amid a major proposed shake-up of laws governing the NHS and its patient data. Proposals in the government’s recent white paper for health and social care would centralise NHS control under Matt Hancock, and could prepare the ground for larger slices of the NHS – including its £10bn/year health data assets – to be contracted to private tech firms.

Who will this brave new world benefit? We have successfully defended the public’s right to be heard before major NHS data deals are signed with large tech firms. It’s now on all of us to speak up if we want our future NHS to serve patients, not profit.


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Mary Fitzgerald Cori Crider | Radio Free (2021-03-30T08:58:26+00:00) We’ve won our lawsuit over Matt Hancock’s £23m NHS data deal with Palantir. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/30/weve-won-our-lawsuit-over-matt-hancocks-23m-nhs-data-deal-with-palantir/

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