Ed Miliband’s intervention on Israel this week matters because it moved British policy from criticism towards consequence. As Foreign Secretary, Miliband announced measures including a proposed ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements and new powers to restrict individuals and companies that support, facilitate or benefit from illegal settlement activity, while joining international partners in warning that settlement expansion and settler violence are undermining a two-state solution. The policy has already provoked a serious diplomatic response from Israel, including the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem.

This is first and foremost a foreign-policy dispute, and it would be a mistake to stretch it into something it is not. Yet Miliband’s position raises a question that could eventually reach well beyond the Foreign Office: if the British Government becomes more willing to attach practical consequences to conduct connected with Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, will ministers also become more interested in the overseas activities of companies receiving large British public contracts? That question leads, perhaps inevitably, to Palantir.

Why Palantir becomes part of the argument

Palantir is an American company, not an Israeli one, and the measures announced by Miliband do not automatically apply to it. There is no evidence that the Government is preparing to use its Israel policy to exclude Palantir from British procurement, and any suggestion otherwise would run well ahead of the facts.

The reason Palantir enters the discussion is its relationship with Israel’s defence establishment. In January 2024, Palantir agreed a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence following meetings in Tel Aviv involving its leadership, with the company saying that its technology would support “war-related missions”. That relationship has subsequently become part of the wider political controversy surrounding Palantir, alongside longstanding arguments over surveillance, defence, data and the company’s extensive work with governments.

The important question, therefore, is not whether Miliband can somehow turn restrictions relating to Israeli settlements into a prohibition on Palantir. He cannot, and responsibility for NHS procurement does not sit with the Foreign Secretary. The more plausible question is whether the political standard being established in one part of government begins to influence expectations elsewhere: how much scrutiny should Britain apply to the international activities of companies entrusted with strategically important public infrastructure?

That debate is already becoming harder to contain within individual departments. This week, fresh controversy over Palantir’s work with English police forces arose and a £21 million contract with the state-owned National Energy System Operator, while the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime has opposed a proposed Metropolitan Police arrangement with Palantir on ethical and transparency grounds. None of these disputes proves that Whitehall is turning against the company, but together they show that scrutiny is no longer confined to the NHS.

The NHS is where politics meets public trust

That makes the Federated Data Platform particularly interesting. Palantir leads the consortium supplying the NHS FDP, a national platform intended to bring operational information held across different systems into a secure environment so NHS organisations can improve waiting lists, theatres, discharge, cancer pathways and other areas of care. The contract has a potential value of £330 million over seven years and can support up to 240 NHS organisations.

Healthcare is different from an ordinary software contract because public confidence is itself part of the infrastructure. Health Innovation Minister James Frith acknowledged that problem this week, saying he was concerned that mistrust of Palantir could affect people's willingness to allow their NHS data to be used for research. Between May and July this year, around 60,000 people reportedly used the national data opt-out mechanism, although it would be wrong to attribute those decisions solely to Palantir.

These concerns did not begin with Miliband or Israel. Palantir has faced scrutiny over NHS data, government dependence on foreign technology companies and its wider corporate relationships for years. What the current political argument potentially does is add another layer to an existing problem: the supplier may increasingly have to demonstrate political and public acceptability alongside technical competence.

There is, however, a crucial distinction that is too often lost in the argument. Palantir is not the Federated Data Platform. FDP is NHS infrastructure; Palantir is the principal technology supplier currently helping to deliver it. NHS England says the NHS retains intellectual property in the FDP solutions it funds or develops, including data models and analytical products, while the contract contains provisions designed to mitigate vendor lock-in and support migration to another provider. In April, health minister Dr Zubir Ahmed told Parliament explicitly that removing a supplier such as Palantir was possible, although doing so would require time and careful transition planning.

That distinction changes the political calculation. A government uncomfortable with Palantir would not necessarily have to abandon years of NHS investment in FDP. In principle, it could decide that the platform itself had become strategically important while eventually asking another company to support some or all of its future delivery.

Why March 2027 changes the calculation

This becomes more than an abstract argument because of the contract timetable. NHS England says that although the agreement can run for a maximum of seven years, only the first three years were initially committed, followed by an option for two additional years and then two further one-year periods. The initial committed period comes up in March 2027, and the Government said in June that the supplier contract would be reviewed through standard contract management processes before a decision on extension.

That does not make March 2027 a referendum on Palantir’s politics. Performance, cost, adoption, continuity, competition and the practical ability of another supplier to take over are likely to matter far more immediately. But it does create a point at which the Government can assess the supplier relationship rather than treating it as something fixed indefinitely, and political questions that were peripheral when the original procurement was undertaken may carry greater weight by then.

Palantir also has a substantial argument in its favour: FDP is increasingly embedded in NHS operations. NHS England reported in June that 139 trusts were live on the platform and 137 were reporting benefits. Its published figures attribute 111,589 additional theatre procedures to trusts using the Inpatient Care Co-ordination Solution compared with previous periods, while OPTICA users recorded a 15.25 per cent reduction in average delayed days among patients staying 21 days or longer, and Cancer 360 had supported 93,691 patient pathways. These figures require some caution because NHS England itself acknowledges that outcomes can be affected by adoption periods, case mix and local operational circumstances, but they make the idea of casually replacing working infrastructure considerably less attractive.

Individual examples reinforce that point. Chesterfield Royal Hospital reported 232 additional patients treated between April and December 2024 compared with the previous year after implementing its FDP Care Co-ordination Solution, alongside a rise in scheduled theatre sessions and substantial reductions in list overruns. If experiences such as these continue accumulating, ministers contemplating a supplier change would have to consider transition risk alongside politics, particularly when waiting lists and NHS productivity remain under intense pressure.

The supplier may become more controversial than the platform

This is where Miliband’s intervention becomes interesting. There is no evidence that his Israel policy will cause Palantir to lose its NHS contract, and the Government’s current position remains that FDP has an important role in improving patient care. Indeed, Ahmed told Parliament in April that FDP would continue to be important while adding something equally significant: “who contracts with the FDP will be open to question” when future contractual arrangements are considered.

The broader issue is therefore less about Israel alone than about what Britain expects from companies embedded in strategic public infrastructure. As the state becomes more dependent on overseas technology providers across healthcare, policing, defence and energy, questions of interoperability, data sovereignty, supplier diversity and the ability to switch providers become political safeguards as much as technical ones. The strongest model for the NHS may ultimately be one in which no supplier, however capable, becomes inseparable from the infrastructure it provides.

Miliband may never have any direct bearing on the future of the NHS Federated Data Platform. But his willingness to turn ethical and geopolitical objections into concrete government measures could contribute to a political climate in which ministers ask harder questions about the companies with which Britain does business, and Palantir is unusually exposed to that debate because of the sensitivity and scale of its government work.

By March 2027, the decision may therefore be more complicated than choosing between keeping FDP and abandoning it. The NHS could conclude that the platform is delivering enough value to become a permanent part of its operating infrastructure while still asking whether Palantir must remain its long-term supplier. In that distinction lies the question that Westminster may increasingly have to confront: not whether Britain still wants the technology, but how much freedom it wants over the company providing it.