A cross-party group of MPs has formally called on the government to trigger a break clause in its contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform, warning that British public services have become dangerously reliant on a small cluster of predominantly foreign technology companies.

The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee made the recommendation in its latest report, published this week, which concludes that the current procurement model places critical national infrastructure in an untenable position. The committee's findings represent one of the most direct parliamentary challenges yet to the government's approach to public sector technology.

At the centre of the report is a warning about market concentration. The committee identifies Palantir, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services as among the dominant providers upon which large swathes of British public administration now depend. In the committee's assessment, the consolidation of this dependency represents a systemic vulnerability: if any of these companies alters its terms, faces regulatory disruption or withdraws from a contract, public services would have limited recourse and few viable alternatives. While the report clarifies that none of these firms are accused of misconduct, it contends that the government has failed to mitigate the risks inherent in such a structural imbalance.

The NHS Federated Data Platform, a flagship health data initiative awarded to Palantir in 2023, is the report's primary focus. The contract, worth up to £330 million over seven years, was designed to allow NHS trusts to share and analyse patient data more efficiently. The committee does not dispute the platform's clinical ambitions, but questions whether anchoring that infrastructure to a single foreign provider is consistent with long-term national interests.

MPs are urging the government to prepare to exercise the contract's break clause and to pursue one of two alternative paths. The first would involve developing a fully in-house, state-owned technological replacement, built and maintained by public sector bodies with direct accountability to government. The second would restructure the procurement process to specifically seek a domestic, UK-based provider, ensuring that sensitive health data and the systems that process it remain within British institutional control.

Neither option is presented by the committee as straightforward. Building in-house capability at the scale required by the NHS would demand significant upfront investment and a sustained commitment to public sector technical recruitment. Sourcing a credible domestic alternative would require the government to actively shape the market rather than simply issue a tender and accept the largest bid. Both paths, the report acknowledges, carry cost and complexity. But the committee argues that the status quo carries a different category of risk: one that is less visible in the short term and considerably harder to reverse.

Dame Chi Onwurah, who chairs the committee, has been direct about the political stakes. She has argued that technology sovereignty must be treated as a matter of national infrastructure policy, not merely a procurement decision. In her framing, essential public services that depend entirely on foreign commercial platforms are not, in any meaningful sense, sovereign. The committee's position is that this is not an abstract concern but a practical governance failure, one that will compound with each new contract awarded to the same cluster of global providers.

The report also calls for reform of wider procurement practices. The committee wants the government to adopt what it describes as smarter procurement, a set of policies designed to actively identify and develop domestic technology capacity rather than default to whichever global firm can offer the lowest headline cost or the most mature platform. This would involve early-market engagement with British companies, longer contract lead times to allow domestic competitors to scale, and evaluation criteria that assign meaningful weight to national ownership and data sovereignty.

The government has not yet formally responded to the committee's recommendations. The Department of Health and Social Care and the Cabinet Office are both expected to submit formal replies in due course. Whether ministers accept the committee's central argument, that foreign dependence in public technology is a policy problem rather than a commercial inevitability, will define the direction of NHS data strategy for years to come.