Foxglove Legal has launched an urgent push in Parliament over Palantir’s role in the NHS’s planned single patient record, warning that the government’s proposed law could force GPs and hospitals in England to hand over complete medical records with names attached. The campaign is aimed squarely at MPs debating the King’s Speech today and at Parliament on Monday, when Foxglove said supporters should email their representatives immediately.
The timing matters because the government used the King’s Speech to announce legislation that would create a single patient record for every NHS patient, and the proposal has already drawn concern over how much identifiable data would be shared. Palantir has been in talks with ministers about the plan, and Foxglove is trying to turn that into a political test for lawmakers before the idea moves any further.
Martha Dark, who was pictured with Hope and Clive Lewis MP after the March 23 drop-in, has helped put the campaign in front of MPs, peers and their staff through a Westminster briefing co-hosted on Monday with Martin Wrigley MP. Foxglove said the session was backed by groups representing doctors, patients and pensioners, and it used the same message the group has been pressing for years: there should be no place for Palantir in the NHS.
That message has sharpened after the Financial Times reported over the weekend that Palantir had been given unlimited access to identifiable health records for hospitals already using its NHS Federated Data Platform tools. NHS England had said that unlimited access to identifiable health records would not happen, but the new reporting opened a gap between what was promised and what was delivered. The company was awarded the £330m Federated Data Platform contract three years ago, and that contract does not expire until February 15, 2027.
Foxglove says ministers are now exploring whether to trigger the break clause in that contract, though no decision has been confirmed. If they do not, the government will be asking Parliament to back a new national patient record scheme while keeping Palantir inside the NHS data infrastructure it already helped build. For Dark and her allies, the immediate question is whether enough MPs will treat today’s debate as the moment to force a rethink before the record-sharing plan becomes law.
