A former NHS England deputy director has said that switching the federated data platform to a new supplier would be a “monumental task”, even as calls grow for the government to end its contract with Palantir.

Tom Bartlett, who served as deputy director of data engineering and integration at NHS England, acknowledged that the health service is not technically bound to the US data analytics company, but warned that the practical effort required to change providers would be a significant obstacle.

Mr Bartlett led technical work on the federated data platform from 2023 until he took voluntary redundancy last month. Writing in a blog post this week, he said there was “no credible alternative to FDP with Palantir right now”, following reports that ministers were exploring the option of triggering a break clause in the NHS’s contract with Palantir, available in February 2027.

He dismissed suggestions that a UK-based company or consortium could step in as a viable replacement, amid wider calls for the government to reduce its dependence on American technology firms and build sovereign capability.

“The reality is, if you just take the 20 years I’ve been working in the NHS, no one local home-grew anything,” Mr Bartlett said. “Where were they 10 years ago when I needed them? They were nowhere to be seen.”

He questioned why domestic firms had not positioned themselves as alternatives earlier, asking whether the barrier was a lack of funding or insufficient lobbying. “They could point at Palantir and, seemingly in an envious way, say, ‘well, I could have done that’. Well, why didn’t you do that?”

Mr Bartlett nonetheless maintained that, from a technical standpoint, the NHS is not locked in. Palantir’s software is “not that bespoke”, he said, and data and data models can be “lifted and shifted” to another provider. The problem, he argued, is the scale at which any such migration would need to take place.

“It would involve migrating all databases, data processes, integrations, and applications,” he said. “The more that exist, the larger the task.”

He drew a comparison with electronic patient record migrations, which are typically contained to individual trusts and carry localised costs. A transition away from the federated data platform would be national in scope, affecting all trusts simultaneously. He suggested, however, that this could also work in the NHS’s favour: “You could argue that it’s cheaper overall, because it is a standard migration pattern rather than migrating 220 trusts with non-standard products. That’s the comparison no one is making.”

The difficulty of any switch would also depend on how embedded the platform has become by the time a decision is made, Mr Bartlett added.

NHS England’s latest figures show that 123 trusts are now live on the federated data platform, with 80 described as “actively reporting benefits”. However, the threshold for being counted as live requires only that a trust has a local instance in place, not that it is actively using the technology. A number of major trusts have yet to make meaningful use of the platform despite a push for full adoption from this month.

Mr Bartlett argued that the original six use cases for the platform were not intended as ends in themselves, but as a means of embedding the technology across the health system. He said the real benefits would emerge cumulatively over time.

He warned that without committing to making the platform a success, the NHS risked remaining where it had been “for the last 20 years”.

MPs are scheduled to debate Palantir’s involvement with the NHS in Westminster Hall today.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​