NHS: Databases
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether Ministers were informed before May 2026 that staff employed by Palantir and external consultants had been granted administrative access to identifiable patient data within the National Data Integration Tenant of the NHS Federated Data Platform prior to pseudonymisation.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care better to improve outcomes for patients.
The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on benefits realised from the FDP, which is available at the following link:
To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, including Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust.
Ministers and the Department are kept informed of the NHS FDP and any material developments through routine reporting and accountability mechanisms. Operational arrangements are managed through established governance and assurance processes. Ministers were not informed of routine access arrangements operating in the National Data Integration Tenant of the NHS FDP before May 2026.
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