Andy Burnham faces a lot of big decisions. But one of the incoming prime minister’s biggest early tests is what he does about the world’s “scariest company” – Palantir. The US defence and surveillance tech behemoth has a swathe of British public contracts, including, most controversially, a £330m deal with the NHS. It’s pretty clear what many of Burnham’s new parliamentary colleagues want him to do: the science, innovation and technology committee says the government should ditch Palantir and its “clear mismatch with UK values”.

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s company is not without British backers. The Times and the Telegraph have been enthusiastic supporters. In the Financial Times last month former Conservative party adviser Camilla Cavendish accused Palantir’s critics of putting politics over progress: “To me, what matters is what works.”

But does Palantir work for Britain? Does the £330m federated data platform (FDP) live up to the claims of Palantir and NHS England? Has it delivered the much-vaunted digital revolution in our healthcare system?

These are questions my Democracy for Sale colleague Lucas Amin and I have been investigating for the past year. We spoke to NHS whistleblowers and Palantir staff, obtained confidential documents and unearthed new data. Our findings, published in the London Review of Books, raise serious questions about the efficacy of Palantir’s technology, about the approach of NHS senior leaders and about the lobbying that helped a Silicon Valley startup expand so quickly in Britain.

Let’s start with the most important part of Palantir’s British operation: the FDP. Built on the company’s Foundry software, the platform was sold as a generational chance to knit disparate data from hospitals, doctors, pharmacists and myriad other sites together into a coherent whole. You’d struggle to find anyone in the NHS who would oppose that.

NHS........

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