Wrigley Is Leading Burnham Down an FDP Off-Ramp to Nowhere

Tom Bartlett is the founder of Bartlett Data Ltd and former Deputy Director of Data Engineering at NHS England, where he led the team that built the Federated Data Platform.

Anti-Palantir campaigners, led by the Liberal Democrat backbencher Martin Wrigley MP, are now at fever pitch, gleefully anticipating what Andy Burnham might do with the FDP contract when he arrives in office. Articles have landed daily covering every conceivable angle, from nit-picking at benefit figures of individual FDP applications, to false claims about system performance and security, through to petty scaremongering about how Palantir is a word from the Lord of the Rings. Andy Burnham is marching on London and will be Prime Minister on Monday 20 July, and this new instability within Labour has piqued the hopes of the dozen or so MPs who have participated in this patient-harming campaign.

Extraordinarily, the demonstrably false claim that Greater Manchester's data platform is better than FDP has made it into parliamentary record due to Wrigley's leading questions and his invitation of his handpicked witness to the select committee. This was closely followed by a letter from the chair, who like Wrigley is a Liberal Democrat, recommending the government exercise the break clause by February 2027. Burnham will now be Prime Minister as the government completes its review of the FDP contract ahead of the 2027 break clause, and he faces the noisy mess of campaign activity as he enters Number 10.

He will not trigger it, because there is no alternative possible by next March. Rob Thompson, the Chief Digital Officer for DHSC and NHS England, told the Health and Social Care Committee on 16 June that exiting the contract and reprocuring from a different supplier could freeze platform development across 139 Trusts for one to three years. That's just the procurement. A replacement would also require a solution to be developed and tested, then a country-wide migration. The majority of NHS Trusts now have live tenants running operational products in daily clinical use: cancer pathway management, referral to treatment validation, discharge planning, theatre scheduling. These are not analytics dashboards. They are tools that clinicians depend on to move patients through their care, and switching them off would cause immediate, measurable harm.

We have already watched this dynamic play out in London. Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m Metropolitan Police contract with Palantir on grounds of values, only for his office to quietly grant a smaller £2m contract and approve a one-year extension to another Palantir arrangement once the operational consequences of withdrawal became unavoidable. Expect further extensions given the same absence of alternative. Palantir has since launched a High Court challenge over the blocked contract. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner said the decision would make Londoners "less safe" and could take 500 to 700 officers off frontline duties. Political opposition gives way to operational gravity. The pattern will repeat with the FDP because the stakes for patients are far higher.

Putting NHS England's disputed figures to one side, Trusts that have embedded the platform into clinical workflows report their own measurable improvements in theatre utilisation and faster patient transfers across organisational boundaries. Some have abandoned six-figure procurements for functionality that FDP delivered at no additional local cost. Others are recruiting in-house Senior FDP Engineers to support data warehouses onto the platform because it offers a more capable and sustainable foundation than what they were running before. Mental Health Trusts are banding together to innovate from the ground up. Many have boosted the quality of data across their entire data estate. Others have improved the user experience for their analytics. Some have even won awards for their work. The operational dependency is deep, and growing deeper with every Trust that adopts.

These local innovations are a strong start, and there is already evidence of what the platform looks like when a hospital takes it even further. Tampa General Hospital in Florida runs one of the most advanced healthcare deployments of the same Palantir platform anywhere in the world. Its Sepsis Hub has contributed to saving 886 lives since 2022. But the technology did not deliver that. Tampa's physicians wrote the clinical rules. Tampa built and funded a dedicated rapid response nursing team to act on the alerts. Tampa designed the operational structure around the tool. The platform provided the integration layer, and the hospital provided everything else. That is the model: clinical teams owning the tools, the platform enabling them. No NHS Trust has reached that point yet. Burnham could create the conditions for them to get there.

The government committed £10bn to digital transformation across the NHS. NHS England has published its Quality Strategy for the next decade, naming the Federated Data Platform as the infrastructure through which frontline teams will lead quality improvement. Both commitments depend on structured clinical data flowing through a national platform. The select committee is recommending the government exit the contract that provides it. Greater Manchester's ICB chose not to adopt FDP. Burnham's national agenda requires it. That tension will be in his red box on day one.

Burnham's opportunity is to shift the emphasis. The national products have their place, but the platform's greater potential is in what frontline teams build when they are given the tools and the permission. Some are already doing this without being asked. He will walk into Number 10 to the sound of campaigners demanding he cancel a contract that his own government's Quality Strategy depends on, that his £10bn digital investment requires, and that 139 Trusts are using to move patients through their care. The noise will be loud, the off-ramp leads nowhere, and the patients on FDP waiting lists, cancer pathways, and discharge plans today will not wait for Wrigley to find an alternative.