That contract value is ridiculous - how many full time staff do they have on this project and what rates are they charging? How can some say ‘operational data collection’ is worth a third of a billion to NHS over the alternatives of using a third of a billion on patient healthcare and actual medical research? This needs an investigation around how this contract was ever approved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.
It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.
Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/0f8a65b5-2...
https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/removi...
nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion.
the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so
Either they are completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by (would be very concerning) or they are corrupt and were bribed.
Definitely not a conflict of interest...
I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.
Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.
So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.
There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.
Just my 2p
So would I and I think Palantir will leak it.
Yep, as someone who's worked at a couple of small startups trying to sell into the NHS, it's terrible. A big part of the problem seems to be that there's no centralised procurement: each trust (of which there are ~200) does their own precurement. And a lot of the companies (the big established players are the worst) at most pay lip service interoperability. So you end with a big mess of system that don't talk to each other.
And they're not setup to pay "market rates" that are competitive with private employers to their in-house developers. So it's hard for them to attract and retain good in-house developers where they have them (although there are still some great people working there).
The total contract value was £182,242,760 over 5 years.
For context that's Roughly 0.0002% per year of NHS budget.
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/2e8c61c0-f...
Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.
QuadmasterXLII•1h ago
(</s>? Maybe? hard to say tbh)
imdsm•56m ago
If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles.
What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.
Angostura•10m ago
Could you be a bit more specific? No IT initiative at all? No attempt to create a national data spine?