Chloe George

Tag: Open Data

  • Dirty Business, a Professor, and Why the Numbers in Your River Don’t Lie

    Dirty Business, a Professor, and Why the Numbers in Your River Don’t Lie

    I watched Channel 4’s Dirty Business in February and I haven’t been able to look at my bathroom the same way since. Not because of the sewage scenes, although those were memorable. But because of a simple piece of arithmetic I did afterwards, sitting at my kitchen table in Frome, Somerset, staring at my water bill like it had personally insulted me.

    The maths was this: while privatised water companies in England dumped 4.7 million hours of raw sewage into rivers and seas in 20241, those same companies paid their shareholders £1.2 billion. That works out at roughly £255 paid to shareholders for every hour of sewage dumped. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m fairly sure that’s not how plumbing is supposed to work.

    And then I thought about the professor.

    Editorial cartoon of a person sitting at a desk looking at a laptop full of numbers. Through the window behind them, a river is visibly brown. The person has a small speech bubble that says Oh.

    A retired detective, a computational biologist, and a river full of dead fish

    Dirty Business2 is a three-part docudrama that aired on consecutive nights in February 2026. It follows the true story of Ash Smith, a retired detective, and Peter Hammond, a retired professor of computational biology (which means he used computers to analyse biological data, like patterns in brain scans), who noticed fish dying in their local River Windrush in Oxfordshire. They contacted their water company to find out why. The company’s response was, as Channel 4’s own synopsis puts it18, “strange and evasive.” So they did what any reasonable retired detective and computational biologist would do: they spent a decade investigating.

    What they found was that untreated domestic sewage was being pumped directly into the river. Regularly. Knowingly. And the regulator, the Environment Agency, was not doing much about it.

    Jason Watkins plays Hammond. It’s a quietly devastating performance. Hammond isn’t a campaigner by instinct. He’s an academic. A man who spent his career at UCL using artificial intelligence and image analysis to spot patterns in brain and facial shape data linked to genetic disorders19. When he retired to the Cotswolds, he was presumably expecting to do whatever retired professors of computational biology do. Birdwatching. Reading. Not spending the next decade downloading discharge data from water company spreadsheets and proving that the Environment Agency was failing to regulate an industry that was openly breaking the law.

    But that’s what he did. Because the data was there. And nobody was reading it.

    The cast also includes David Thewlis as Smith, Asim Chaudhry as a sewage plant whistleblower who risks everything, Posy Sterling as Julie Maughan, and Lucia Keskin18, whose deadpan comedy has no business being this good in a drama about sewage but somehow is.

    But the real people behind the drama are the ones that stay with you. Julie Maughan lost her eight-year-old daughter Heather Preen in 1999 after Heather contracted the most aggressive strain of E. coli on a beach in Dawlish, Devon3. A storm pipe had discharged raw sewage into the sea days before. Julie has been campaigning ever since. Twenty-seven years. Reuben, an ex-surfer and teacher from Devon4, developed Meniere’s Disease (a permanent condition that causes vertigo and hearing loss) after surfing in polluted water. Suzi Finlayson5 developed a blood infection after swimming off Bognor Regis that led to infective endocarditis (an infection of the heart lining) and required open heart surgery. She nearly died.

    In 2025, Surfers Against Sewage reported1 that 1,236 people got sick after using English bathing waters. Nearly three quarters of those cases were at waters officially classified as “good” or “excellent.” The classification system, in other words, is working exactly as well as everything else in this story.

    Editorial cartoon of a beach with an Excellent water quality sign while the water behind it is visibly brown. A family approaches, the parent giving a thumbs up at the sign while a child points warily at the dirty water. A seagull on the sign wears a gas mask.

    The numbers that should make you scream into a river (but please don’t, it’s full of sewage)

    Editorial cartoon of water company executives celebrating a flipchart showing reduced sewage spills, with small print reading NB: It just didn't rain, while a dried-up river with a stranded fish is visible through the window.

    I’m going to list some numbers now. I’m going to do it calmly, in the style of someone reading a weather forecast about the end of the world.

    In 2025, the Environment Agency recorded 291,492 monitored spill events6 across England. That’s sewage being discharged into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. Once every two minutes, give or take. The total spill duration was 1.87 million hours, down from 3.61 million hours in 20246. The government’s headline: “Fewer and shorter storm overflow spills.” Which is true, in the same way that “fewer people were bitten by sharks this year” is true if everyone stayed out of the water because there was a drought.

    Because that’s the thing. England had its second driest spring since 1836, and 2025 was the warmest and sunniest year on record for the UK20. The sewage numbers went down mostly because it didn’t rain enough to trigger the overflows. Storm overflows are basically valves built into the sewer system that open during heavy rainfall when the pipes can’t cope. There wasn’t much heavy rainfall. The companies did less damage, not because they’d fixed anything, but because the weather was nice.

    Editorial cartoon of a water company executive proudly holding a rosette next to a banner reading Sewage Down 48 percent while standing on cracked dry earth under a blazing sun. A wilting flower says It just didn't rain.

    Yorkshire Water, just to pick a company entirely at random, imposed a hosepipe ban on its customers in July 202521. The same company had almost tripled its serious pollution incidents the year before and been given a red rating by the Environment Agency22. So: you can’t water your garden, but we can water the river with your sewage. Clear?

    Giles Bristow, chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, put it this way1: the companies dumped sewage illegally for hundreds of thousands of hours on dry days, made scores of people sick, polluted bathing sites classified as safe, and just three months into 2026, their level of dumping already dwarfs last year.

    He’s right. But “the system is broken” suggests something that was once working and has gone wrong. I’m not sure that’s what happened here. I think the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s just that it wasn’t designed for us.

    Editorial cartoon of a garden fence splitting the image in two. On the left, a sad person holds a wilted plant next to a Hosepipe Ban sign. On the right, a massive pipe gushes brown water into a river. Both sides have the same company logo.

    Follow the money (it’s definitely not going into pipes)

    Here is where I need you to sit down, if you’re not already. Possibly with something strong. Water, ideally. Although after reading this, you might check the source first.

    When the water companies were privatised in 1989, the government didn’t just hand them the keys. It wrote off all their existing debt and gave them a £1.5 billion “green dowry”7 (a cash sweetener to attract buyers) to get started. They began life with a clean balance sheet, zero borrowing, and a monopoly customer base that had no choice but to pay them. A business model even I could run, and I once broke a website by accidentally deleting the database.

    Since then, according to figures cited in Parliament7, the water companies have paid out between £75 billion and £85 billion in dividends to their shareholders. That’s roughly half of everything they spent on infrastructure in the same period. They’ve also accumulated more than £60 billion in debt. Started with nothing. Now owe everything. Paid out half the investment budget to shareholders. Still dumping sewage in the river. That’s the business model.

    Editorial cartoon showing a cross-section pipe system where money from water bills flows mostly toward a yacht labelled Dividends, while a tiny cracked pipe labelled Infrastructure has a single drip. Caption reads The plumbing.
    The plumbing

    Research from the University of Greenwich8 found that the companies invested no net additional shareholder equity since privatisation. None. The investment came from customer bills. The dividends came from borrowing. The debt gets paid back through higher bills. You, the person reading this while your toilet makes a suspicious noise, are funding the entire operation.

    And the people running it? Thames Water’s current CEO, Chris Weston, has a pay package that can reach £2.25 million per year9: £850,000 base salary, pension of £102,000, and a bonus worth up to 156% of salary. In his first three months on the job, he received a £195,000 bonus. In April 2025, the company distributed £18.5 million in retention bonuses to senior executives10, despite having just been fined £123 million by Ofwat (the water regulator) and needing a £3 billion emergency loan from creditors to avoid collapse. The Environment Secretary Steve Reed called it “outrageous.” The Prime Minister’s spokesperson called it “rewarding failure.”

    Editorial cartoon of two payslips side by side. The first reads Employee: CEO, Days worked: 90, Bonus: £195,000. The second reads Employee: Engineer, Days worked: 365, Bonus: a smiley face sticker.

    And these companies aren’t even British, not really. England’s nine major water and sewerage companies are more than 90% owned by overseas investors7: sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms based in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Qatar, and the UAE. People with, as one Member of Parliament noted, “little or no physical contact with polluted rivers and crumbling infrastructure.”

    Meanwhile, in Scotland, where water is publicly owned, Scottish Water invests 35% more per household8, charges less, has reduced its debt, and pays no dividends. It’s almost as if the problem is structural. Almost as if you can see it in the numbers, if anyone bothers to look at the numbers.

    Editorial cartoon of two identical taps side by side. The left tap labelled England has brown water dripping into a champagne glass held by a hand wearing a diamond ring. The right tap labelled Scotland has clean water flowing into a regular glass. The England tap has a higher price tag.

    The professor looked at the numbers

    This is the part of the article where I stop being funny, which is a relief for everyone, and talk about data instead.

    Peter Hammond, the real Peter Hammond, is a professor of computational biology19. His career was analysing complex datasets to find patterns that human eyes miss. When he looked at the discharge data from the sewage works near his home, he didn’t see a river. He saw a dataset. And the dataset told a story that the water company and the Environment Agency were either not reading or not willing to tell.

    Ash Smith brought the detective skills. He knew how to follow a trail, how to spot when someone was lying, how to build a case. Hammond brought the data skills. Together, they built Windrush Against Sewage Pollution11 into a formidable investigative operation and did, for free, what a billion-pound regulator was failing to do. They proved that untreated sewage was being routinely dumped into their river, that the water company knew, and that the system designed to prevent it was, at best, asleep.

    Smith said something in an interview that I’ve been turning over in my head since I heard it. In his words12: “Criminality is built into their business model.”

    That’s not rhetoric. That’s a conclusion from the data. And the thing about data is that it doesn’t go off-air after three episodes. It doesn’t get scheduled against a rival drama. It doesn’t require a BAFTA-winning actor to deliver it, although Jason Watkins certainly helps. Data just sits there, patiently, waiting for someone to read it and understand what it means.

    The water companies are banking on the hope that you won’t.

    The data is there. The bridge isn’t.

    Here’s what’s remarkable. The data that exposes this scandal is, for the most part, already public. The Environment Agency publishes 10 open APIs13 (application programming interfaces, basically ways for software to pull data automatically): Bathing Water Quality, Water Quality, Hydrology, Flood Monitoring, and more. The Event Duration Monitoring data14, the stuff that shows exactly how often and how long each storm overflow discharged, is downloadable from Defra’s data platform under the Open Government Licence. Thames Water even has its own storm discharge API.

    Companies House holds every water company’s filing history, director appointments, and accounts. Ofwat publishes performance data. The information about who owns what, who got paid how much, and where the sewage went is, technically, available to everyone.

    Technically.

    In practice, trying to find out how much sewage was dumped near your house involves navigating a government data platform that makes an Ofgem price cap document look like a picture book. The EDM data comes in spreadsheets, by company, with columns labelled things like “Permit Number” and “Consented Discharge Type.” The APIs require you to know what an API is, which most people who just want to know if the river is safe to paddle in do not.

    I’ve written before about what happens when powerful organisations control closed data15: contracts get awarded in ways that are hard to scrutinise, dependencies get built that are hard to reverse, and accountability becomes something that only exists on paper. The water industry is a mirror image of that problem. Here, the data is technically open, but it might as well be closed because nobody who needs it can actually read it.

    What’s missing is the bridge. The thing that takes scattered government data and turns it into something you can use at your kitchen table. Something that lets you type in your postcode and see, in plain English: how many hours of sewage was dumped near you last year, how much your water company paid in dividends, what the CEO earned while it happened, and how your experience compares to Scotland, where the water is publicly owned and the rivers have actual fish in them.

    That’s what Power to the Minions is supposed to be about, if I ever finish building it. Taking open data, the stuff that’s technically public but practically invisible, and making it usable. Not by experts. Not by retired professors of computational biology (although they’re welcome). By ordinary people who want to know why their bills are going up while their river is going brown.

    Two-panel editorial cartoon. Left: a person overwhelmed by a wall of dense government data. Right: the same person smiling at a phone showing clear, simple sewage and CEO pay data for their postcode. Caption reads Building the bridge.
    Building the bridge

    Tim Berners-Lee built the web so that information could flow freely, so that anyone, anywhere, could access what they needed to make informed decisions. Thirty-five years later, the data that proves water companies are pumping sewage into children’s paddling spots is sitting on a government server behind an interface that looks like it was designed to discourage curiosity. That’s not a bug. That’s what happens when accountability is optional.

    So what can you actually do?

    First: watch Dirty Business if you haven’t. It’s on Channel 4. It’s three episodes. It will make you angry and that’s the appropriate response.

    Second: check the Surfers Against Sewage Water Quality Report1 for data on your area. They’ve done extraordinary work making sewage data visible.

    Third: support the campaign for public ownership. We Own It16 has been building the evidence base for years. Their figures are devastating and well-sourced.

    Fourth: write to your MP. The data exists to make your case. The Water (Special Measures) Act 20256 is law. It gives Ofwat new powers to block executive bonuses and impose stronger penalties. A new single regulator is coming. Ask what’s being done. Ask when it will be operational. Ask why your water bill is going up while the CEO’s bonus went up faster.

    Fifth: someone needs to build the tools that make this data impossible to ignore. Not a three-night TV event, brilliant as Dirty Business is. Something permanent. A postcode lookup that shows you exactly what’s happening to your water, your money, and your river, updated in real time, built on open data, free to use, and owned by nobody except the public. I’m having a go at this, between the school run and the software I keep accidentally breaking. It’s slow. But the data is there.

    Peter Hammond, a retired professor with a spreadsheet and a dead river, proved that one person with the right skills and the right data can hold a billion-pound industry to account. The point is to make sure you don’t need to be a professor of computational biology to do the same thing. The data should be readable by anyone. The tools should be free. And the companies that dump sewage in your river while paying their CEO £2.25 million should have nowhere to hide.

    One last thing

    Dirty Business had a working title. Before the lawyers got involved, before the schedulers and the marketing teams and the people who build 10-metre-wide fountains of brown water on the South Bank17, the show was called Isle of Shite3.

    Editorial cartoon of a film clapperboard with Isle of Shite written on it, crossed out, and Dirty Business written underneath. A tiny hand-written note in the corner says legal said no.

    I think they should have kept it. It’s accurate. It’s memorable. And it sounds like something a computational biologist would say very quietly, while looking at a spreadsheet, just before he proves something that a billion-pound industry wishes he hadn’t.

    The data doesn’t lie. The rivers don’t lie. The numbers in your water bill don’t lie. The only people lying are the ones who’ve been paid £85 billion to keep the pipes working and haven’t.

    Your toilet is a political act. Flush wisely.

    A note: This piece is based on publicly available data from the Environment Agency, Surfers Against Sewage, Ofwat, Companies House, Hansard, and academic research from the University of Greenwich. All figures cited are sourced and linked. Opinions are my own and are clearly marked as such. I’m not a lawyer, a water engineer, or a retired professor of computational biology. I’m someone who can just about read a spreadsheet, got angry, and wrote it down. You might too. Well, you might get angry. The spreadsheet bit is optional.

    References

    1. Surfers Against Sewage: Water Quality Report 2025, including 4.7 million hours of sewage discharge in 2024, £1.2 billion in shareholder dividends, 1,236 people made ill. https://www.sas.org.uk/resource/water-quality-report-2025/
    2. Wikipedia: Dirty Business (TV series), including cast, production details, and WASP origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Business_(TV_series)
    3. Big Issue: “Dirty Business: A Deep Dive into TV’s Sewage Drama”, including Joseph Bullman quotes, Heather Preen, and WASP background. https://www.bigissue.com/culture/tv/dirty-business-water-sewage-channel-4/
    4. Surfers Against Sewage: “The Real People Behind Dirty Business”, including Julie Maughan, Reuben, and Chris Hines. https://www.sas.org.uk/updates/dirty-business-real-people-sewage-drama/
    5. Oceanographic Magazine: “The Human Cost of the Sewage Crisis”, including Suzi Finlayson’s story and 2026 dumping data. https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/they-cant-be-trusted-to-protect-our-health-the-human-cost-of-sewage-crisis/
    6. House of Commons Library: Research Briefing CBP-10027, “Sewage discharges”, March 2026. Covers 291,492 spill events, Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Cunliffe commission, and government white paper. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10027/
    7. Hansard: House of Lords debate on Water and Sewage Companies Directors’ Remuneration, 22 February 2024. Covers dividends since privatisation, total debt, overseas ownership, and zero debt at privatisation. https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-02-22/debates/55D8B31D-41B2-4991-80D7-1F61127249BA/WaterAndSewageCompaniesDirectors
    8. University of Greenwich: Hall and Yearwood, “Water and Sewerage Company Finances”, 2021. Covers no net shareholder equity, Scottish Water comparison, dividend analysis. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/34274/
    9. Wikipedia: Chris Weston (businessman), including pay package details, £195,000 bonus for first three months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Weston_(businessman)
    10. ainvest.com: “Thames Water Compensation Controversy”, August 2025. Covers £18.5 million retention bonuses and £123 million Ofwat fine. https://www.ainvest.com/news/thames-water-compensation-controversy-executive-pay-public-trust-shape-utility-valuations-2508/
    11. Windrush Against Sewage Pollution: Dirty Business page. https://www.windrushwasp.org/dirty-business
    12. Voice Magazine: Dirty Business review, including Ash Smith’s “criminality is built into their business model” quote. https://www.voicemag.uk/review/16309/dirty-business-review-tv-channel-4-sewage
    13. Environment Agency API Catalogue: 10 publicly available APIs including Bathing Water Quality, Water Quality, Hydrology, and Flood Monitoring. https://www.api.gov.uk/ea/
    14. Defra Data Services Platform: Event Duration Monitoring dataset, downloadable under the Open Government Licence. https://environment.data.gov.uk/dataset/21e15f12-0df8-4bfc-b763-45226c16a8ac
    15. chloegeorge.co.uk: “The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS”. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/palantir-nhs-seeing-stones/
    16. We Own It: Water public ownership campaign, evidence base and cost savings analysis. https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/water
    17. Channel 4 / 4Creative: “Fountain of Filth” press release, South Bank marketing stunt for Dirty Business launch. https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4s-4creative-exposes-sick-truth-behind-britains-sewage-scandal-bold-new-fountain
    18. Channel 4 Press: Dirty Business cast announcement and official synopsis, 15 January 2026. https://www.channel4.com/press/news/david-thewlis-jason-watkins-asim-chaudhry-and-bafta-rising-star-posy-sterling-lead-cast
    19. Windrush Against Sewage Pollution: “Who We Are”, including Peter Hammond’s career at UCL’s Institute of Child Health, AI and image analysis research, and WASP founding. https://www.windrushwasp.org/who-we-are
    20. Met Office: “2025 is double-record breaker: UK’s warmest and sunniest year on record”, January 2026. Covers England’s second driest spring since 1836, warmest year since 1884, sunniest year since 1910. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2026/2025-is-double-record-breaker-uks-warmest-and-sunniest-year-on-record
    21. Yorkshire Water: “Yorkshire Water’s hosepipe restrictions begin”, July 2025. https://www.yorkshirewater.com/news-media/news-articles/2025/yorkshire-water-s-hosepipe-restrictions-begin/
    22. Yorkshire Post: “Yorkshire Water to hike bills above inflation again”, January 2026. Covers EA red rating and serious pollution incidents almost tripling in 2024. https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/business/yorkshire-water-to-hike-bills-above-inflation-again-5494234
  • The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS

    The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS

    Coming up in today’s show and tell…

    • Palantir, a surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel with CIA seed money, now holds over £500 million in UK government contracts, including a £330 million deal to run an NHS data platform covering tens of millions of patients.
    • The contract grew from a £1 pandemic “freebie” to £60 million without any competitive tender. When the £330 million contract was finally published, 71% of it was blacked out because the data protection terms hadn’t been agreed yet.
    • Palantir’s lobbyist was Peter Mandelson’s firm Global Counsel. Mandelson held a ~21% shareholding while arranging meetings between Palantir’s CEO and the Prime Minister. He has since been sacked as ambassador and is under police investigation. Palantir still has all its contracts.
    • The NHS’s own chief data officers said their existing tools were better than what Palantir was offering. Scotland kept Palantir out entirely. The government is paying KPMG £8 million to persuade hospitals to use software they don’t want.
    • Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project offers an alternative model where data stays under the control of the people it belongs to. The NHS chose the opposite approach. The contract comes up for review in February 2027.

    Update, 23 March 2026

    Four days after this article was published, the Guardian reported that Palantir has been awarded a contract by the Financial Conduct Authority to analyse its internal intelligence data, including case files, emails, call recordings, and reports of suspected financial crime across 42,000 firms. Palantir now holds contracts covering NHS patient data, Ministry of Defence operations, police systems, and financial regulation. The cross-departmental infrastructure this article warns about isn’t a future risk. It’s being built right now, one contract at a time. A full investigation into the FCA deal is coming.

    I fell down a rabbit hole this week. It started with a question about what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of Palantir, and it ended with me staring at a Hansard transcript at midnight going “no, but seriously, WHAT?” I need to tell you about it, because it’s one of those stories where the more you find out, the more unbelievable it gets, and I think more people should know.

    Fair warning: this starts with Tolkien, takes a detour through watermelon cocktails, and ends with your medical records. Stay with me. I promise it’s worth it.

    A quick word about seeing-stones

    In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a palantír is a seeing-stone. Think crystal ball, but instead of a fortune teller at a village fete telling you you’ll meet a tall stranger, it lets you spy on people across vast distances. The Elves made them for good reasons. Then the bad guys got hold of them, and it all went sideways. Saruman used one and thought he was gaining power. He was actually being controlled. Denethor used one and it drove him to despair. The palantír is Tolkien’s cautionary tale about what happens when surveillance technology ends up in the wrong hands.

    In 2003, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel co-founded a data analytics company. He named it Palantir. He also named his offices after Middle-earth locations: Gondor, Rivendell, the Shire. His venture fund Founders Fund bankrolled a weapons company called Anduril (Aragorn’s sword), founded by former Palantir executives. He co-founded a separate venture fund called Mithril (the magic armour metal). You have to admire the commitment to the theme, if nothing else.

    Now, I want to believe he just really liked the books and thought “seeing-stone” sounded cool. But Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford. He’s not a man who picks names carelessly. And I think if you name your surveillance company after a fictional device whose entire literary purpose is to warn you about the dangers of surveillance, you probably understood the assignment. You just disagreed with the conclusion.

    That company now holds over £500 million in UK government contracts, including a £330 million deal to run a data platform for the NHS. Your NHS. Your data. And the story of how that happened is genuinely one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever tried to write down.

    The £1 contract (or: how to buy the NHS with watermelon cocktails)

    Cartoon of two people at a dinner table with watermelon cocktails, a napkin reading NHS Patient Data 57 million records, and a £1 coin being slid across the table. Caption: Just a casual dinner.

    The version of this story most people know goes like this: pandemic hits, NHS needs help, generous tech company steps in for £1, everyone claps. It’s a lovely story. It’s also not quite what happened.

    The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Palantir had been courting the NHS for months before Covid was a thing. In July 2019, Palantir’s UK boss Louis Mosley hosted a dinner with the chair of NHS England. The email chain, which I have read more times than is probably healthy, mentions “exotic drinks” and “watermelon cocktails.” Over these watermelon cocktails, they discussed potential uses of NHS data. The chair emailed afterwards: “If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data… do be in touch.”

    Just a nice dinner. Just some cocktails. Just the beginning of what would become half a billion pounds in government contracts. As you do.

    By January 2020, two months before the pandemic, Palantir’s London team were already building a product “exclusively focused” on the UK healthcare market. So when Covid arrived and they offered to help for £1, that wasn’t a random act of kindness. That was the free sample outside a shop. The first one’s always free.

    And oh, did it work. £1 became £1 million by July 2020. Then £23 million by December. That £23 million contract was awarded without competition. Through various extensions, Palantir won £60 million from the NHS without ever competing against another company. Sixty million quid and not a single tender. I once had to fill in a 12-page form to get a £500 council grant for a community project, so apparently there are different processes depending on how many zeros are involved.

    Cartoon of a man sliding a £1 coin across an NHS reception desk while behind him sit increasingly enormous money bags labelled £1M, £23M, £60M, and £330M. Caption: Just getting my foot in the door.

    In 2021, openDemocracy and the legal campaign group Foxglove sued the government over it. The government’s legal position was, and I am not making this up, that “citizens have no right to a say in major NHS contracts” with big tech firms. Your health data. No say. They actually argued that. In a court. With lawyers and everything. Faced with a judicial review, they caved and promised not to extend Palantir’s role without consulting the public.

    They broke that promise two years later. In March 2023, leaked documents showed NHS bosses had quietly ordered hospitals to upload patient data to a new Palantir-run database, without the public consultation they’d committed to. Their own internal documents acknowledged this was “likely to be perceived by some privacy campaigners as contentious.” I admire the understatement.

    Then came the big one. November 2023: a £330 million, seven-year contract to build something called the Federated Data Platform (which is the kind of name that sounds important enough that most people stop asking questions, which I suspect is the point). When the contract was made public, it was released on the last working day before Christmas, and 417 of its 586 pages were completely blanked out.

    I should explain what “blanked out” means here, because it’s actually worse than it sounds. “Redacted” means the pages existed but their contents were hidden with black boxes on the version published for the public to see. So journalists, MPs, campaign groups, your GP, you: none of us could read what was in 71% of the contract. Government policy says public bodies have to give reasons when they redact contracts. No reasons were given.

    The Good Law Project launched legal proceedings to find out what was underneath all that black ink. And what they discovered was, if anything, more alarming than what anyone had guessed. The pages weren’t redacted for national security reasons or commercial sensitivity in the usual sense. They were blanked out because those sections, including the data protection clauses, hadn’t actually been agreed yet. NHS England’s own lawyers admitted the provisions were still “subject to commercial negotiation.”

    Let me just make sure that’s landed. NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to handle the health data of tens of millions of people. They signed it. Then they continued negotiating the terms afterwards. Including the bit about how your medical records would be protected. And when they published the contract, they hid the unfinished bits by blacking them out and releasing it on the day everyone was wrapping presents. The Good Law Project said this was potentially unlawful, not least because once you’ve signed, you’ve given away your negotiating power. Palantir already had the deal. What incentive did they have to agree to stronger privacy terms at that point?

    I’ll just leave that there for a moment while we all process it together.

    Cartoon of a woman reading a thick document where every page is covered in black redaction bars. She has reached page 417. A mug on the desk reads Transparency. Caption: The public version.

    Then, within weeks of signing, Palantir secretly hired a Tory-linked PR agency to pay social media influencers to promote the platform. The briefing asked the influencers not to mention Palantir by name. The NHS investigated it as a potential contract breach. It’s like watching someone trip over their own shoelaces at a job interview. Except the job is running the health data of everyone in England.

    Wait, but what does the NHS actually need this for?

    Before I go any further, I want to be fair about something. The NHS has a real problem, and Palantir offered a real solution to it. If I don’t explain that, this whole piece sounds like conspiracy thinking, and it isn’t. The problem is genuine. It’s who we chose to fix it that’s the issue.

    Here’s the thing about the NHS: it’s enormous, and it’s fragmented. There are around 200 hospital trusts in England, plus integrated care boards, GP practices, mental health trusts, ambulance services, and community health providers. Each one has its own IT systems. Many of those systems are, to put it diplomatically, not new. Some of them can’t talk to each other at all. Your GP records are in one system. Your hospital records are in another. Your outpatient appointments might be in a third. Your prescription history could be somewhere else entirely.

    If you’ve ever turned up at A&E and the doctor has asked you questions that you know are already in your medical records somewhere, you’ve experienced this problem personally. If you’ve ever been referred to a specialist and had to explain your entire history from scratch because they couldn’t see your GP notes, that’s the same problem. It means duplicated tests, missed information, delayed discharges, and longer waiting lists. People genuinely suffer because NHS data systems don’t join up. Better data integration could genuinely save lives. Nobody disputes this.

    The Federated Data Platform was supposed to fix it. The idea was to link up all that fragmented data so the NHS could see, in real time, how many beds are available across a region, where waiting lists are longest, where ambulances are being held up, and where discharge bottlenecks are causing problems. At a trust level, it would help hospitals manage patient flow and theatre scheduling. Perfectly reasonable goals. Genuinely useful. The kind of thing you’d want your health service to be doing.

    So the question isn’t: did the NHS need better data infrastructure? It did. The question is: did the NHS need this company to build it? A company founded with CIA money, whose main clients are military and intelligence agencies, whose co-founder has documented ties to a convicted sex offender, and whose lobbyist is under criminal investigation? When the NHS’s own chief data officers wrote an open letter saying they already had tools that exceeded what the FDP was offering? When Leeds Teaching Hospitals said adopting it would mean losing functionality? When the contract was awarded through a process involving £60 million in uncontested deals, broken consultation promises, and privacy clauses that weren’t finished when the thing was signed?

    The NHS needed a better filing system. What it got was a surveillance platform with a lobbying operation, a Tolkien fixation, and a founder who thinks democracy is overrated. Which, as solutions go, is a bit like calling a plumber and getting a submarine. Technically it involves pipes, but it’s not quite what you had in mind.

    If the product isn’t better, what’s actually going on?

    This is the bit where I need to be really careful, because I’m going to lay out a set of documented facts and then ask an open question, and I want to be clear about which is which.

    Here are the facts. Scotland kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely. Their data systems work. Their patients are being treated. The sky did not fall in. The NHS’s own chief data officers said their existing tools were better than what Palantir was offering. Leeds Teaching Hospitals said adopting the platform would mean losing functionality. Most trusts don’t want it. The government is paying KPMG £8 million to persuade hospitals to adopt it. If you’re paying a consultancy firm eight million pounds to convince your own customers to use your product, the product is not selling itself.

    So why is it still happening? Let me show you what the public record says about who benefits.

    Palantir paid Global Counsel, Mandelson’s lobbying firm, from 2018 onwards. The fee has never been publicly disclosed. Mandelson retained a roughly 21% shareholding in Global Counsel while simultaneously facilitating meetings between Palantir and the Prime Minister. That means he had a direct financial interest in Palantir winning UK government contracts. That’s not speculation. That’s Companies House filings and Hansard.

    The Good Law Project noted that the head of Palantir’s UK operation made a donation to a Conservative minister. The revolving door between the NHS and Palantir is documented too: openDemocracy found that at least three former NHS data experts left the health service and joined Palantir, including Indra Joshi, who was the NHS’s head of AI and helped launch the Covid-19 datastore, the first NHS project to use Palantir’s software, before leaving the health service and joining the company in 2022. Imagine being the person responsible for introducing a company’s product into your workplace, then going to work for that company. It’s technically legal. It doesn’t look great.

    Cartoon showing a revolving door between three buildings labelled NHS, Palantir, and Government, with people carrying boxes of belongings walking calmly between them in a circular pattern while a cleaner mops the floor unbothered.

    On the political side, the Good Law Project found that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has accepted up to £372,000 from companies and individuals with links to private healthcare since entering parliament in 2015, representing more than 60% of his total registered donations. Nobody is suggesting that money was specifically in exchange for the Palantir contract. But when a Health Secretary who has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from private health interests is privately briefed that a private health contractor’s reputation is damaging delivery, and his response is to press on with the contract anyway, it’s reasonable to ask what’s shaping his priorities.

    I want to be honest: nobody has produced a smoking gun showing someone received a brown envelope in exchange for this contract. That’s not how it works at this level, and expecting it to look like that is how it keeps working. What the public record shows is lobbying fees, shareholdings, political donations, a revolving door of staff, dinner party networks, and the kind of access that money buys but never explicitly pays for. It’s structural, not transactional. The money doesn’t flow in a straight line from A to B. It flows in a circle, where relationships become contracts become jobs become donations become access become relationships again.

    I don’t know exactly who benefits from this arrangement or by how much. But I know that when a product the customers don’t want is being sold to them with £8 million of public money, by a company whose lobbyist had a financial stake in the outcome, whose staff are recruited from the very organisation they’re supposed to be serving, and whose contract was signed before the privacy terms were even agreed… “sorting out the NHS’s data” probably isn’t the whole story.

    The man behind the seeing-stone

    To understand how we got here, you need to know a bit about Peter Thiel. He studied philosophy at Stanford, which I mention because his philosophy is genuinely built into Palantir’s DNA, and it’s… well. It’s a lot.

    He co-founded PayPal. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. He created Palantir with seed funding from In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm (the CIA has a venture capital arm! I didn’t know that either, and I sort of wish I still didn’t). His biographer Max Chafkin describes his thinking as “bordering on fascism”. He’s written openly that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. In his book Zero to One, he argues companies are better run than governments because they have a single decision-maker. A dictator, essentially, though he’s too polished to use that word.

    His political network is vast. JD Vance, the current US Vice President, is Thiel’s protégé: mentored by him, employed by him, and bankrolled with $10 million for his Senate run. More than a dozen people with ties to Thiel sit inside the Trump administration, including former Palantir staff in the Department of Health, the Treasury, and DOGE. Stephen Miller, the architect of America’s mass deportation policy, personally owns more than $100,000 of Palantir stock. Palantir makes the software that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US agency currently carrying out mass deportation raids under Trump) uses to find people. I’m not going to draw you a diagram. You can see it.

    And then there’s the Epstein connection. Byline Times documented that Thiel maintained a business relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein through a venture fund called Valar Ventures, from 2014 until Epstein’s final arrest in 2019. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak described Thiel and Epstein as “co-owners” of the fund. Thiel’s spokesperson denied the “co-owner” bit but confirmed Epstein was a limited partner. The distinction may matter to some people. I will let you decide if you’re one of them.

    The man actually running it

    Thiel is the co-founder and chairman. But the person running Palantir day to day is Alex Karp, and he’s arguably even more interesting, because he’s the contradiction that makes the whole thing work.

    Karp and Thiel met at Stanford Law School. Karp then went off and got a PhD in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. He grew up in a leftist family with activist parents. He describes himself as “progressive but not woke” and has donated to Biden and Kamala Harris. On paper, he’s the political opposite of Thiel. And yet they co-founded the same surveillance company, and they’ve been running it together for over 20 years. Funny how that works.

    In 2024, Karp was the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company in the United States, with compensation of almost $6.8 billion. That’s billion with a B. For context, the entire £330 million NHS contract, the one that’s supposed to transform healthcare data for the whole of England, is roughly 3% of what Karp personally earned in a single year. I don’t know what to do with that information. I’m just putting it there.

    He’s also been saying some very interesting things out loud recently. On CNBC last week, he said “what makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war.” He’s described himself as “exceedingly proud” of Palantir’s work supporting Israel. And in the same interview, he said that AI technology will reduce the economic power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of “working-class, often male” voters. Which is, I think, a remarkably candid thing for a self-described progressive to say about his own product. The New Republic described it as a direct pitch to the Republican Party from a CEO whose company is already embedded in the Pentagon.

    So that’s Palantir’s leadership. The co-founder believes democracy is incompatible with freedom. The CEO describes himself as progressive while running a surveillance company that aids deportation raids, supports military operations, and whose product he cheerfully admits will undermine the economic power of educated women. They present as opposites but they built the same machine and it serves the same ends. The difference is that Thiel is honest about his philosophy. Karp wraps the same outcomes in nicer language.

    The Mandelson web (where it gets really wild)

    OK. This is where the story goes from “that’s concerning” to “are you actually serious.” I need you to stay with me because every single thing I’m about to say is documented, sourced, and on the public record, even though it reads like the plot of a thriller that would be rejected for being too far-fetched.

    In 2018, Palantir hired Global Counsel, the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson. The goal was to make Palantir look like a respectable partner for the UK government. At this point, both Thiel and Mandelson were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Thiel through Valar Ventures. Mandelson through a personal relationship that continued after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex offences against children. The man hired to make the surveillance company look respectable, and the man who founded the surveillance company, were both connected to the same convicted sex offender.

    I’ve typed that sentence several times now and it still doesn’t feel real. But it is.

    Global Counsel got busy. In February 2023, they hosted a dinner where the NHS’s chief data officer was listed as the “guest of honour”. Nine months later, Palantir won the £330 million contract. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

    When Mandelson became UK Ambassador to the US, civil servants warned him that his interest in Global Counsel “would have to cease”. He didn’t comply. He kept his roughly 21% shareholding. While still ambassador, still holding those shares, he arranged a meeting between Palantir’s CEO and Keir Starmer at Palantir’s US headquarters. The meeting didn’t appear on the PM’s register of visits.

    Shortly after, the MoD awarded Palantir a contract worth roughly £250 million. Directly. Without competition. MPs asked for the documents from the Starmer-Palantir meeting. The government refused, saying it was “too expensive to find them”. The minutes of a meeting between the Prime Minister and a surveillance company that just received a quarter-billion-pound defence contract. Too expensive to locate. I’ve lost socks that were easier to find.

    Mandelson has since been sacked as ambassador, forced to resign from Labour and the House of Lords, and is under Metropolitan Police investigation. Global Counsel has gone into administration. But Palantir still has every single one of its contracts.

    Byline Times asked the question that I think deserves a proper answer: if Mandelson’s links to Epstein disqualify him from holding power, why does the company controlled by Epstein’s business partner still have access to the UK’s most sensitive infrastructure? Nobody’s answered that yet. I’d genuinely love to hear someone try.

    Why your NHS data matters more than you think

    Here’s where we need to talk about what Palantir’s software actually does, because it’s not just a fancy spreadsheet.

    Palantir’s Foundry platform is designed to link datasets that weren’t previously connected, find patterns between them, and build profiles. That’s the product. That’s what it does for the CIA. That’s what it does for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US agency carrying out mass deportation raids under Trump), combining immigration records with financial data and phone records to track people. That’s what it does for the military, fusing satellite imagery with intercepted communications to generate targets. Palantir’s CEO said last week that “what makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war.” Charming.

    That same cross-referencing engine now sits on top of the NHS.

    The NHS holds structured health data on the population of England. Your GP visits, your prescriptions, your mental health records, your sexual health, your pregnancies, your addiction history. Linked to your postcode and date of birth. Ernst & Young estimated in 2019 that this data is worth £9.6 billion a year: about £5 billion to commercial organisations who could profit from the patterns, and £4.6 billion in benefits to patients through better outcomes.

    I want to pause on that framing for a second, because it bothers me. The NHS wasn’t built as a data asset. It was built to look after people. The data exists because doctors and nurses care for patients. The fact that someone put a commercial price tag on it, and bundled “value to pharmaceutical companies” together with “benefits to sick people” into one headline number, tells you something about how this conversation has already been quietly shifted underneath us.

    A report from health justice group Medact, backed by Amnesty International, Privacy International, and the Good Law Project, just laid out why the next shift should worry us. Medact warned that the platform could enable government departments like the Home Office and police to access patient data. Palantir’s own UK executive has argued publicly for a “common operating system” linking NHS, DWP, and other public data. And Reform UK has explicitly pledged to “automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police” to find and deport people. The infrastructure for that is being built right now. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s in their policy document.

    The chilling effect is already measurable. During the pandemic, around 57% of migrants avoided seeking healthcare because they feared being reported to the Home Office. Put a surveillance company’s cross-referencing engine in the middle of that system and people who need medical help will stop asking for it. That’s not hypothetical. That’s maths.

    Meanwhile, fewer than a quarter of England’s 215 hospital trusts were actually using the platform by the end of 2024. Leeds Teaching Hospitals told NHS England it would “lose functionality rather than gain it”. The response from government? They paid KPMG £8 million to “promote the adoption” of software that hospitals don’t want. Eight million pounds of public money on what is essentially a marketing campaign for a product the actual customers are politely declining. That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today, and yet here we are.

    Cartoon of a man in a suit enthusiastically presenting a laptop labelled Platform to tired NHS staff in scrubs, one of whom is holding their own laptop with a sticky note reading Already works. A banner behind reads Adoption Campaign £8m budget.

    Tim Berners-Lee and the road not taken

    Right. Here’s the bit that turns this from infuriating to properly heartbreaking. Because there was always another way, and it was right there.

    Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and gave it away for free. No patent. No licensing fee. Because he believed information should be open and accessible to everyone. I wrote my university dissertation about him in 2002 (specifically about whether Flash animation would be the future of the web, which in hindsight was not my strongest prediction), and I’ve been banging on about his vision ever since. But his recent work is what matters here.

    He’s been building a project called Solid, which does exactly what the NHS needed: it keeps data under the control of the people and institutions it belongs to, with access granted on a permission basis. No centralised platform. No vendor lock-in. No surveillance company required.

    Split panel cartoon. Left side labelled The Seeing Stone, Palantir: a man sits alone in an armchair clutching a glowing orb with tiny people visible inside it. Right side labelled The Web, Given away free 1989: a diverse group of people each hold their own small glowing orb, smiling.

    Speaking in Barcelona on 3 March, he demonstrated an AI assistant called Charlie that pulls from a user’s own data store, not a corporate database. He said: “Claude doesn’t understand anything about you, but Charlie does.” Because Charlie has permission to use your data, on your terms. That’s the model. That’s what was always possible.

    The NHS’s own people knew this. The NHS Chief Data and Analytical Officer Network wrote in an open letter that they “already have similar tools in use that presently exceed the capability” of what the Federated Data Platform was offering. They didn’t need Palantir. They needed investment in what they already had.

    Berners-Lee and Thiel are almost perfect philosophical opposites. One built the web and gave it away because he believed it belonged to everyone. The other built a surveillance company and named it after Tolkien’s cautionary tale about surveillance. One believes you should own your own data. The other believes exceptional individuals should control it. The NHS chose Thiel’s model. Nobody asked us which one we preferred.

    What can actually be done (the hopeful bit)

    I promised myself I wouldn’t write one of those pieces that makes you feel terrible and then stops. So here’s the constructive bit, and I mean it.

    The political picture isn’t great right now. Wes Streeting was privately briefed that Palantir’s reputation was hindering the platform’s delivery and pressed on. In private WhatsApp messages to Mandelson, he conceded Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes”, while publicly dismissing concerns about Palantir’s NHS involvement. It’s fair to say the political class, across parties, has not covered itself in glory on this one.

    But there are real pressure points, and real people applying real pressure. The contract comes up for review in February 2027. The BMA has formally called for the contract to end. Medact’s report is backed by Amnesty International, Privacy International, and the Good Law Project. Scotland has kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely, which proves it’s possible. Local campaigns are fighting trust by trust, ICB by ICB.

    And here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that actually gives me hope, although I want to be honest about the limits of that hope because I think you deserve that. Every single fact in this article comes from a public source. Companies House filings. Contracts Finder. Hansard. The lobbying register. FOI responses. Investigative journalism built on publicly available records. The information is all there. It’s just scattered across dozens of databases that don’t talk to each other, which means connecting it all up currently requires months of work by specialist journalists and lawyers with resources most of us don’t have. Most of us are trying to get through Tuesday.

    So I’ve been thinking: what if there were a tool where you could type in any company’s name and see, in one place, what public contracts they hold, who their directors are, who lobbied for them, and what political donations are connected? Not opinion. Not editorialising. Just public data, linked up and searchable. The kind of thing that currently takes an investigative team months, available to anyone with a browser and a cup of tea.

    I’m calling the project Power to the Minions, because I’m a mum of four who lives in Frome and I think naming things should be fun, and also because that’s literally what it is: giving ordinary people access to information that currently only well-resourced professionals can piece together.

    Now. Before I get carried away with my own pitch, let me be the first to say: I’m not going to pretend a search tool fixes democracy. If it were that simple, someone would have done it by now, and we’d all be living in a utopia where government contracts were awarded on merit and dinner party invitations had no bearing on procurement decisions. Clearly, we are not living in that utopia. I checked.

    The investigative journalists who broke this story are brilliant. openDemocracy, the Bureau, Byline Times, Foxglove, the Good Law Project: they’ve done extraordinary work over six years. And Palantir still has its contracts. So why would a tool help where journalism hasn’t?

    Here’s my honest answer: journalism produces stories. Stories have news cycles. They peak, they get shared, people are outraged for a week, and then everyone moves on to the next thing. The Palantir-NHS story has been broken repeatedly since 2020. Each time there’s a flurry of attention. Each time it fades. The contracts remain. That’s not a failure of journalism. That’s the nature of how attention works. A story is a photograph of a problem. What doesn’t exist yet is a window.

    The difference between a photograph and a window is that the photograph gets looked at once and then goes in a drawer. The window means anyone can look, any time, for as long as the building stands. A tool that connects Companies House data with Contracts Finder with Hansard with the lobbying register isn’t a photograph. It’s a window. It doesn’t need a news cycle to work. It’s just there, permanently, for anyone who wants to look through it.

    Cartoon of a woman holding a cup of tea, looking through a window at an illuminated web of connections linking nodes labelled Contract, Director, Donation, Lobbyist, Minister, and Dinner. Caption: What if the light was just always on?

    Does it stop Palantir on its own? No. Of course not. A window doesn’t stop a burglar. But it does mean the neighbours can see what’s happening. And it means the next time someone awards a contract to a company whose lobbyist is under criminal investigation and whose founder has documented business ties to a convicted sex offender, the connections are visible within minutes instead of months. That changes who can ask questions, how quickly, and how often. It doesn’t replace the journalists and lawyers. It gives them (and everyone else) a head start. Instead of spending three months finding the web, they can spend three months acting on it.

    Also, and this is the bit that quietly matters most: it changes the calculation for the people doing the dodgy deals. Right now, if you’re awarding a contract to a friend of a friend after a nice dinner, you know it’ll take years for anyone to connect the dots. If the dots connect automatically the moment the contract hits Contracts Finder? You might reconsider whose dinner invitation you accept. Transparency doesn’t just expose problems. It prevents some of them from happening in the first place, because the humans involved are, at bottom, quite keen on not being caught.

    I know what I’m describing sounds like it might already exist. There are good tools out there. OpenCorporates makes Companies House data searchable. They Work For You makes Hansard searchable. But nobody’s built the connective layer between them. You can look up a company. You can search for contracts. You can check the lobbying register. You can search Hansard. What you can’t do, anywhere, is go from “this company got this contract” to “and here’s who lobbied for it, and here’s where the directors sit on other boards, and here’s who donated to which politicians” in one search. That’s the gap. And it’s the gap where the story lives.

    The elephant in the room: they already have our data

    I can hear the question, because I asked it myself: even if we get Palantir out at the 2027 review, haven’t they already had access to our data since 2020? What’s done is done, surely?

    Fair point. And I want to be honest about it rather than do the thing where you pretend there’s a magic undo button and everyone goes home happy. Yes, Palantir has been processing NHS data for over five years. The structural knowledge they’ve gained, the patterns they’ve identified, the architecture they’ve built: that institutional learning doesn’t evaporate when a contract expires. Nobody’s invented Ctrl+Z for corporate knowledge. That’s a real and uncomfortable truth.

    But ending the contract still matters. A lot. It stops the ongoing, daily access to live patient data. It prevents the Federated Data Platform from becoming the permanent infrastructure through which a future government could do cross-departmental surveillance. It breaks the vendor lock-in before it becomes irreversible. And it sends a signal, to Palantir and to every other company watching, that there are consequences for how you behave, who you associate with, and whose data you handle. Consequences are underrated. We should have more of them.

    Scotland proves it’s possible. They kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely. The sky didn’t fall in. Their data systems still work. The patients are still being treated. The lesson is clear: you don’t need a CIA-funded surveillance company to manage healthcare data. You need investment in your own people and your own infrastructure. Which is, funnily enough, what the NHS’s own data chiefs were saying all along, to anyone who was listening, which apparently did not include the people signing the contracts.

    There’s something Tim Berners-Lee said that I think about a lot: the web was designed, which means it can be redesigned. The same is true of the systems that currently protect opacity. They were built. They can be rebuilt. And you don’t need to be an investigative journalist or a lawyer to help. You just need the data to be findable.

    The seeing-stone serves whoever holds it

    Cartoon of a glass orb on a desk with GP records, Prescriptions, Mental health, Postcode, and Date of birth written inside it. Two hands reach for it from opposite sides: one with an NHS cross on the cuff, the other with an eye symbol cufflink. Caption: One seeing-stone to rule them all.

    I keep coming back to Tolkien, because the metaphor really is almost annoyingly perfect.

    The palantír isn’t dangerous because the bad guys built it. The Elves built it, for perfectly good reasons. It’s dangerous because once it exists as a centralised tool of seeing, it serves whoever holds it. The Federated Data Platform is the same. The NHS built it to manage waiting lists. Reasonable goal. But once it exists as a single connected data layer across the entire health system, run by a company whose core business is cross-departmental surveillance, you’ve created something whose potential uses extend well beyond anything the NHS intended.

    A future government that wants to cross-reference your health data with your immigration status, your benefits claims, or police intelligence doesn’t need to build anything new. The pipes are already laid. They just need to turn the taps.

    Cartoon of an NHS building with coloured pipes labelled GP Records, Prescriptions, Mental Health, Sexual Health, and Immigration Status all feeding into a single tap controlled by a suited hand, dripping into a bucket labelled TBD. A diverse group of patients watches from outside. Caption: The plumbing is already done.

    Tim Berners-Lee closed his Barcelona talk with something that I think is worth finishing on: “Imagine apps which are collaborative, which are creative, which are compassionate. Imagine this world, and do whatever you can to get towards that world.”

    I reckon “whatever you can” is the important bit. Not everyone can sue the government or fund a legal challenge. But we can build tools that connect public data. We can support the people doing the hard work: openDemocracy, Foxglove, the Good Law Project, Medact. We can pay attention. We can refuse to let complexity be the thing that shields power from accountability.

    The man who invented the web gave it away because he believed it belonged to everyone. The man who founded Palantir named it after a fictional surveillance device because, I suspect, he understood exactly what he was building.

    I know which vision I’d rather build towards. And if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you do too.