Palantir's Covid-era UK health contract extended without competition

NHS England has extended its contract with US spy-tech biz Palantir for the system built at the height of the pandemic to give it time to resolve the twice-delayed procurement of a data platform to support health service reorganization and tackle the massive care backlog. The contract has already been subject to the threat of …

[Binraider]

External company fails to deliver on promises, yet again, partly due to ill defined and conflicting requirements, moving goalposts, and self-interest in being able to print more revenue.

The same story can be found everywhere. If your IT problem is that big, you probably want your own team / department / directorate to develop and maintain it.

Not saying you can't get contract IT in do do jobs successfully, quite the opposite. But for some problems, DIY is the only way to really get what you want (if you know what you want). Conflicting NHS trusts probably don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

>External company fails to deliver on promises, yet again, partly due to ill defined and conflicting requirements

To be fair in this case the requirement was the NHS saying to industry "1,000 people are dying every day and we have no idea how to understand the data needed to fix that pls help", so some movement of goalposts is absolutely fine. What was built works well and was done in an inhumanly short stretch of time. It contributed in a material way to helping the NHS respond to covid, particularly in the domain of planning and executing the vaccine rollout.

The problem is that all of this was done on an emergency basis. The selection was done in a back room mostly based on conversations between a couple of people from Number 10 and Palantir's execs. There was no competitive bid, no analysis of alternatives and no assessment of business case or value for money. This deployment of Foundry has now become a piece of what is effectively critical national infrastructure. It's costing the NHS something like £20m a year for what is a relatively modest data platform hosting about a dozen simple dashboarding and reporting applications. That number is about to grow to hundreds of millions per year with the FDP. It is pure and simple profiteering.

[elsergiovolador]

"1,000 people are dying every day and we have no idea how to understand the data needed to fix that pls help"

To be fair you don't need a system to figure out why this is happening. Poorly paid staff working long ours, long waiting lists and corruption.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes mate if we'd just doubled nurses' salaries Covid would have just gone away, genius plan, how didn't we think of that?

[cleminan]

Clearly not. More staff working fewer hours has been a desperate need in the NHS for years. But a decade of pay lagging inflation & the private sector hasn't helped.

However, using experienced civil servants to undertake and train colleagues on test and trace - a job already performed by authorities up & down the country for contagious human, livestock and wildlife diseases at a smaller scale - rather than sideline them entirely and getting yer mates in would've been one of many considered and sensible. Augmenting their number with appropriate external suppliers would likely have been necessary.

Recognising that Northern Italy closely resembles the UK's health and societal makeup would also have been a sensible set of lessons to learn from as the virus loomed ever closer.

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with T&T. That was delivered by a dedicated body called NHS Test & Trace, and funnily enough their digital services were principally delivered by NHS Digital, though the actual tracing (as you well note) was not.

The platform run on Foundry is the NHS Covid-19 Data Store and lives with NHS England: https://www.england.nhs.uk/contact-us/privacy-notice/how-we-use-your-information/covid-19-response/nhs-covid-19-data-store/

It also had its delivery led by civil servants - most notably on the dashboarding side of the house - but sheer capacity and time constraints meant some external provider was needed. For better or worse that's Palantir. What you're saying should have happened is, in this case, exactly what did happen.

The problem isn't what was done or how it was done, it's how Palantir have been allowed to leverage that emergency deployment into a £25m per year platform today without competition, and are using that for a £325m contract next year. All without anyone stopping to check if there's any value for money being delivered.

[NeilPost]

Don’t forget the *illnesses* the sick people go to the NHS for.

I’m not correlation does not imply causation… but it’s probably a significant factor.

[cyberdemon]

Perma-crisis

Hundreds of millions a year?? --- >

The trouble with this government is that Everything is being done on an emergency basis, which gives them Trump-style powers to get away with murder. The irony is that this huge expense will probably be used to justify the argument that the NHS needs to be privatised. At which point, the insurance companies will know exactly who to pay to run their risk calculations..

> It contributed in a material way to helping the NHS respond to covid

Er, did it? I hear this a lot, but really can anyone tell me: In what "material way" did Palantir help the vaccine rollout, which couldn't have been achieved with a simpler, cheaper, less all-encroaching system? Or indeed whatever system the NHS had before?

According to Palantir's "We're trustworthy, trust us." blog, "Healthcare organisations, for instance, have used our software to tackle challenges like efficiently allocating PPE supplies when thousands of hospitals across the country have radically different and constantly changing levels of supply and demand for each item of PPE."

Well, that went bloody brilliantly then, didn't it!

How long until the PNC is up for renewal and Palantir get control of the police computer systems as well, I wonder?

If you read their second boring blog post "purpose-based access controls", it sounds as if there is no fundamental separation of data, and that anyone could be granted access to absolutely anything and everything, provided they have the proper 'clearance'. This could potentially mean that ministers could alter the police files on inconvenient persons "Russia/Iran/China style", in a future even-more-dystopic Britain.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Perma-crisis

Palantir themselves did things no better than any other platform would have done. Arguably they did it quicker because Foundry is an absolute doddle for normal human beings to use, and at least during covid things were basically being done at cost.

The data delivered by the Covid Data Repository was used to underpin strategic decision making at every level from number 10 down to individual trusts and local councils. It was an enormous help, and the UK probably had the best understanding of what was happening during the crisis of any country*. If you saw a dashboard or a figure during Covid in the UK it was probably built in the CDR, or from data delivered by the CDR team.

*How Boris et al decided to use that understanding is, of course, a different question.

You might be sitting there asking yourself how this is £25m per year of data platform. That is *exactly* the right question to ask.

[Evil Auditor]

DIY is the only way to really get what you want (if you know what you want).

While my own anecdotal evidence confirms, I don't fully agree. Obviously, you have to know what you want to get it. But the question of DYI vs purchasing is whether the solution is a significant part of your core business.

[Anonymous Coward]

you haev no idea

Palantir got the data for free from the NHS & then refused to give the processed data back to the NHS' own data analysts...

That "OS of the NHS" is going ot be a cluster fuck. £350 million project...so you can double that. With senior members of NHS Improvement having got jobs at Palantir, it's all dodgy as hell. THEN add in to the mix that Trusts can happily tell NHS England and NHS Digital where to go when they try to force it on them.

[elsergiovolador]

WEF

Palantir is a WEF affiliated organisation and such access to data is crucial when it comes to development of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset.

All the baselines for social credit score have to be calculated from somewhere.

All these legal challenges will not stop it. If Klaus wants, Klaus gets. Just look how they forced Sunak to become our PM.

But don't worry, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy!

[Dan 55]

Re: WEF

From Wikipedia:

WEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; building in a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way, utilising environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and "harness[ing] the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution."

Why is this so terrible?

[elsergiovolador]

Re: WEF

It's like quoting the official name of North Korea: "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" and asking why is it so terrible? It's democratic and belongs to people...

It's just an instance of doublespeak. They need to maintain the look of innocence to the average person.

[Dan 55]

Re: WEF

Yeah... I was rather hoping for a real answer e.g. comparing what they say with what they've done.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

fuck when did qanon fuckwits start reading the reg.

slacken the tinfoil, your damaging what's left of your mind, your brain cell is dying

[Zolko]

Re: WEF

qanon fuckwits

actually, I've never understood what Qanon means. I guess that the "anon" part comes from "Anonymous", but then why "Q" ? Since you seem to be versed in the subject, would you please explain ?

[ds11]

Re: WEF

BBC have done a series on the origins of Qanon - worth a listen

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001324r

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

fucking hell at least 7 qanon fuckwits downvoting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

I'm inclined to agree with /some/ of what Elser is going on about TBH.

The idea of giving corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple power over governments, especially when it's coming directly from the "Davos Men", does indeed sound dodgy. I looked up this "Great Reset" for the first time and found this article interesting: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theories-aside-there-something-fishy-about-great-reset/

Which is why the idea of giving all the nation's health data over to Palantir is made all the more dodgy by the news (to me) that they are endorsed by the WEF.

It's also a logical statement that since powerful people do conspire, then some conspiracy theories must be true. Therefore not all conspiracy theories are false. It's also plausible that if there are "true" conspiracy theories out there, then there may be stooges planted (or bots operated) to spout endless, ridiculous, false conspiracy theories to drown out the true ones, and there could be counter-stooges planted to shout down anyone who entertains anything other than the official government line, i.e. all conspiracy theorists are crackpots. The apparent fact that anyone who dared question the safety of what was a very new piece of vaccine technology was shouted down as being anti-vaccine, itself made me question wtf was going on.

George Orwell 'touched on this' in 1984, and it feels to me as if you could be put on a nutjob watch list these days for simply watching Zeitgeist or even Adam Curtis. We're a state that labels a vulnerable autistic 14 year old girl as a terrorist simply for downloading a "bomb making manual" and prosecutes her, despite knowing that someone else groomed her into doing it.

Anon, because I don't want to be moved up the list of crackpots/nutjobs/enemies of the new state.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

>Palantir is made all the more dodgy by the news (to me) that they are endorsed by the WEF.

Nobody is "endorsed" by the WEF. The WEF is a trade body that makes its money providing window dressing for soft-right political thinking friendly to businesses, and as an excuse for their execs to have a jolly to Davos every year on the company dime. Think of it like the UK's CBI, but wearing Patagonia and giving a TEDx talk about how we can revolutionise the world of business with new mindfulness and web 4.0 or some other waffle.

There is absolutely nothing nefarious about the WEF, at least no worse than any other business lobby group. Palantir are a WEF partner, but so are 50 other major companies: only counting those whose names also start with P. Practically every company on earth is linked to the WEF in some way. The OP in this thread is proposing that Palantir's role is in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by the WEF wherein every person in the country/world will have a "social score" computed and every facet of their lives owned by nefarious definitely-not-globalists, and that they've employed 110,000 people to convince you this isn't happening. A conspiracy of thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of people, all enmeshed into every government in the world.

This is, of course, complete fucking nonsense with no basis in reality and absolutely no link to the article upon which the OP decided to comment.

It's the same old conspiracy theory with a new title. If you see someone talking about the WEF and it's not Davos week they are almost certainly a pants-on-head wingnut. There's a better-than-evens chance there's a copy of the Elders of Zion kicking about in their library to boot.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: WEF

Whoever is operating that account, you need to train your AI better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

and you need to stop spreading conspiracy nuttyness.

your nuttier than squirrel shit!

[elsergiovolador]

Re: WEF

You need to ask your supervisor for better scripts. Ad hominem, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WEF

wow, you like to double down on the quackery. nice paranoid "everyone is being told/paid to tell me I'm a fucking conspiracy nutter"

you need better bollocks from your facefuck/twatter/rumble/other_nutter_social idiot groups.

sane people know how to spot conspiracy nutters by now and we are sick of the stupid screaming bollocks.

[Roger Kynaston]

different spiel same old crap

According to the Graun Dishcloth is giving a speech outlining his priorities. "The NHS needs better data management and patients need more control of it". So he does this by giving his long termer mate Peter Thiel all our health records?

[NeilPost]

Re: different spiel same old crap

NHS NPfIT #2 on it’s way, at taxpayer expense:

What the NHS needs is removal of the artificial barriers of hundreds of overlapping trusts with local processes, local finance teams, local procurement teams, local boards etc and a return to single national standards with local regional management operating within that framework.

Can you imagine working for Tesco (Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust) and have to redo mandatory training, and a pile of other local admin so you can work for Tesco (University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire Trust) or adjacent Tesco (University Hospital Birmingham trust). Madness.

Multiply every bureaucratic process x 200+ trusts in England alone…. and also add in national standards and other half used national systems (ESR Electronic Staff Record) where many only use it for clunky Oracle payroll (you have separate ESR’s if you work for 2 trusts) and every trust is doing training differently with ‘local processes’ and systems.

People with Compassion can also have a sensible business/process mindset too. They are not mutually exclusive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: different spiel same old crap

Those things are being worked on. Anon since an insider working on these things :-)

[Roger Kynaston]

Re anon insider

Ooh. Are you Steve Barclay?

[fidodogbreath]

Solid advice from the vendor

"No, don't waste time improving your specifications and getting stakeholder agreement. That will just delay the project and force us to re-allocate our staff to other projects. As your Palantir project manager, my advice is to keep throwing no-bid contract money and random change orders at us until the system does what you want. That's the fastest and most effective way to shore up our balance sheet for the rest of the decade get your project up and running!"

[TimMaher]

What’s that, coming over the hill?

Is it Palantir? Is it Palantir?

This stinks in so many ways and is slimy to the touch.

[TheInstigator]

I feel all warm and fuzzy now I know the Americans have access to my health data ...

... but that's ok cause I have nothing to hide!

(Sarcasm for those who didn't notice)

[seldom]

Re: I feel all warm and fuzzy now I know the Americans have access to my health data ...

Upvoted because I'm in Switzerland and I feel warm and fuzzy because even though I pay a fortune (£500/month family of 3 with paying all costs up to £2200/year per person and after that 10% of all costs) for my health care, my data is safe.

[Lil Endian]

Re: I feel all warm and fuzzy now I know the Americans have access to my health data ...

Upvoted for your gratuitous financed schadenfreude!

[Naich]

Working as intended

If you see the NHS as nothing more than a way to shovel vast quantities of public money to your mates via their companies, then this is a resounding success.

[ds11]

Actual use for Blockchain?

Health records may actually be a genuine use for blockchain with my health records directly under my control and where I am able to grant or deny access to them at a granular level.

Meanwhile, in the real world..........

[ColonelClaw]

Why do I get this feeling that a current Tory MP will be landing a shiny new job at Palantir after the next election?

[TheInstigator]

.. because you're probably right ;)

Don't you find it strange that MPs consistently opt not to vote in the similar rules that it insists those working in finance adhere to in terms of hiring senior political figures etc?

"It's OK as long as I can get away with it ... but you? No - sorry"