Greater Manchester has become the only English regional health board to repeatedly reject Palantir’s federated data platform, choosing instead to keep an analytics system developed locally over almost a decade. The decision has made the region a prominent test of whether national standardisation should outweigh local control, technical flexibility and public confidence.
The wider National Health Service is moving in the opposite direction. Britain commissioned Palantir in 2023 to develop the platform, known as the FDP, and began rolling it out in early 2024. Palantir and the NHS say it is already reducing waiting times and hospital stays while improving the use of operating theatres. WIRED notes that these are claims from the supplier and health service, not conclusions independently established in its report.
Greater Manchester keeps its homegrown platform
The FDP is designed to organise health data across a national pool and local databases. Hospitals and regional care boards can use it for tasks such as managing waiting lists, planning discharges and identifying gaps in care. Its shared technical foundation is intended to let one NHS organisation reuse tools created by another, while also creating a common data layer for artificial intelligence.
Adoption is already broad. NHS figures cited by WIRED show that 139 of roughly 200 trusts are live on Palantir’s technology and 35 of England’s 36 integrated care boards actively use it. Greater Manchester is the sole regional board that has consistently declined full adoption, although local trusts use the FDP for limited purposes. Palantir disputes suggestions that their use is minimal.
The Greater Manchester board instead relies on its Analytics and Data Science Platform, or ADSP, serving about three million people. In May 2025, the board concluded that its local capabilities exceeded what the FDP offered for its needs and were two to three years ahead in some areas.
That assessment is contested. Palantir says there is little independent evidence linking the ADSP directly to better care or savings. Advocates of the national system also argue that comparing the two as general alternatives is misleading because the FDP connects organisations across the NHS, while Greater Manchester’s claim of superiority applies specifically to a regional care-board setting.
Technical flexibility meets a question of trust
Greater Manchester says its system includes primary-care data unavailable through the FDP and can be reconfigured more easily because it is assembled from technologies controlled locally. If one component becomes outdated, the board says it can replace that component rather than change the entire platform.
The local case also rests on public confidence. Health data is unusually sensitive, and useful analytics depend on patients sharing information and clinicians accepting the tools built from it. The board argues that years of local development have established trust that a politically controversial outside supplier cannot quickly reproduce.
Palantir counters that thousands of NHS employees already use its platform and that many have publicly described benefits. Those statements demonstrate active adoption but do not settle the trust question in Greater Manchester. The region delayed a scheduled review of its position after concluding that public concern had intensified.
The political context is difficult to separate from the technology. Palantir’s work in warfare and US immigration enforcement has generated protests, petitions and parliamentary scrutiny in Britain. Other European governments are also reassessing dependence on American technology. Palantir maintains that it is not a political organisation and says its technology can improve public services and save lives.
A contract decision could reshape NHS data strategy
The UK government has an opportunity next February to activate a break clause in Palantir’s NHS contract rather than let the agreement run until 2031. A bipartisan group of politicians has described reliance on one foreign vendor as an unacceptable weakness and called for domestic alternatives. A separate parliamentary committee later made similar arguments.
Supporters of the FDP warn that terminating the contract could discard years of implementation without leaving a viable replacement capable of connecting the NHS’s many components. They say some organisations could fall back to fragmented spreadsheets, paper and whiteboards, the problems the platform was meant to address.
WIRED’s reporting does not establish whether the national platform or Greater Manchester’s system delivers better overall results. Their scopes differ, the central claims are disputed and independent outcome evidence is limited. What the regional holdout demonstrates is that health-data infrastructure cannot be judged only by features. Interoperability, vendor dependence, local capability and public legitimacy all influence whether a technically capable system can work in practice.
