(www.bbc.com)
Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental.
See also senior staff at NHS England (or Digitial? can't remember) handing massive NHS compute contracts to AWS, and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee.
It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy.
As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.
This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.
I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 .
The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.
The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.
If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role.
Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me.
No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.
Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...
Today in things that the press isn't legally allowed to describe as corrupt but would probably reach the intuitive threshold for corruption for most people who this is explained to.
I get the same feeling every time I see oracle chosen for anything.
Because where they are in their career at that point isn't the endgame and being the person that does the deal and throws the money around is how you get the board position where you broker those deals with governments, the NGO think tank position, essentially all the actually high paying roles.
Same reason the US political system is falling apart - buyable businessmen eh I mean politicians in power. „Lobbying“
Because of financial kickbacks. This is also why people should be suspicious at the current age-sniffing movement. Their next move was "VPNs must be abolished". We can see which mega-corporations finance those movements. Quite suspicious how different countries so easily "copy-paste" this legislation.
Agreed. It is said that Peter Mandelson had links to Palantir. (1) And also Wes Streeting (2)
1) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mande...
The company bid for this contract, and lost to Palantir. I still can't believe that a company trying to do this in exactly the right way lost to a US intelligence company.
Free software from Palantir is not free. Peter Thiel's co is all about monopolies.
Oh, and don't forget to opt your data out of Palantir: https://your-data-matters.service.nhs.uk/
1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model.
2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means.
This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data, or if you have a sudden, short-term need. In the longer term, it's probably cheaper and more effective to develop a competent tech team, modernize the source data systems, and roll your own integration -- but that also requires leaders with long-term vision who are resistant to external hype and pressure.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
> Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework.
> If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
Also it's not like 4 years ago either UK or EU governments would expect they will soon want to get rid of all US companies in their public sector.
But its kind a obvious why some system for refugees was outsourced for consultancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
I'll give you an example. At a previous employer, We used Google Analytics. We paid for Google Analytics. I feel positive that as a mid size company, We shouldn't have paid for Google Analytics. The free product with 50 events in GA4 should be plenty for us. But why do we use Google Analytics in the first place? Because everyone uses Google Analytics.
I agree that sometimes Salesforce might be a good idea. However, it should be a part of an overall strategy, not just because everyone does it. This kind of deliberate tooling strategy is difficult though because the way Google Analytics or Salesforce works from what I understand is make marketing folks feel they are specialized in Google Analytics or Salesforce so they feel like they have to keep using it or their skill will become useless.
It is like resume driven development but for the whole business.
It's like this for most software, but as a salaryman it's better for you if you use the common software. If you have an interview you can now say "I know how to use the thing that most people use" instead of "Actually we had an inhouse system so if you hire me I need to be onboarded for 3 months".
I got hired to my 2nd job in large part because I knew how to use Broadridge Paladyne (back then it was pretty good if you got over the pretty bad UI/UX, by today's standards it's not great).
„Everyone does that“ is definitely part of decision-making process almost everywhere, but I personally have not seen companies where it’s just a cargo cult rather than a reasonable strategic choice. The obvious benefits are that it’s easier to find implementation partners, the costs are predictable and your users may already know the system, so you won’t have unnecessary friction in your ops.
1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.
2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.
3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.
This is the kind of thing GDS and other Civil Service departments build all the time, its a completely standard kind of challenge that a small team of Devs (+ supporting staff) from a departments DDAT department does day in and day out.
The output will be open source by default and use existing standards.
That America's brightest tech minds can't solve this problem is embarrassing. (Never mind the baggage of giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access to something as sensitive as residency and visa information.)
I can't believe that in our timeline Europe has to think like this, but here we are.
Note that Palantir is an American company that failed to solve this problem well, and introduces an adversarial risk to the UK.
And ran out of rows
For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.
> The MHCLG [ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.
I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.
You were talking about a team of 5 cranking this out in about 2-3 months with some longer term part time involvement, with an annual cost of less than 1m and those people mostly all dellivering several product lines ( so actual cost is half or a quater ).
Governments build these kinds of systems ("collect data from a bunch of internal systems and show some public forms and have some internal processes for handling form submissions") all the time. When I worked for a local municipality, we built something like this every other month.
The difference is always having one or two devs who care. Every successful software project I've ever seen has had a few devs who care way more than is healthy
Not having the system (it's not like it's already in use anyway) is always a good step in the right direction. And a replacement built-in UK will provide more jobs, more tax money, and digital sovereignty for UK.
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted...
It didn't work very well, so GDS rebuilt it in-house.
Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off.
Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may become "human rubber stamp" when the number and speed of AI recommendations exceed real human review capacity.
A Palantir-backed program reportedly operated secretly from city council members, defense attorneys, and the public.
Vendor lock-in issue: once a system becomes embedded in agency workflows, switching vendors becomes politically and operationally hard and they are trying their best to achieve this. The Army's $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidating many contracts into one Palantir platform is the cleanest example of institutional dependence.
--- tldr;
The accountability chain is broken: when harm happens, the agency blames the tool, the vendor blames the customer, the operator blames policy, and the model blames the data.
---
Also, I won't share the full report link since whenever I share something like that here, I get banned/flagged for a day.
1. ICE awarded Palantir a reported $30 million contract for ImmigrationOS, described as a platform to support immigration lifecycle operations, including enforcement prioritization and self-deportation tracking.
2. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was designated a Pentagon ‘program of record’ in March 2026, with 20,000+ active military users and a contract ceiling that grew from $480 million to $1.3 billion.
3. The US Army’s $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidates 75 separate contracts into one Palantir platform.
4. The Maven Smart System has 20,000+ military users across 35+ military tools.
5. The UK NHS Federated Data Platform, valued at £330 million ($448.4 million), places Palantir at the center of England’s health-data architecture.
6. Palantir’s UK public contracts across NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils, and police forces total more than £500 million.
7. NHS England’s Data Protection Impact Assessment documents 15 inherent risks, all assessed as ‘Low’ residual risk after mitigations.
8. The NHS FDP contract was published with 417 of 586 pages redacted.
9. Palantir received more than $113 million in federal spending since Trump took office, plus a $795 million Pentagon contract.
10. Polling cited by The Guardian indicates more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust Palantir specifically regarding NHS patient data.
11. From detection to ‘prosecution’ (killing), ‘no more than two or three minutes elapse’ with Palantir systems, compared to six hours previously.
12. Palantir’s lobbying spending more than quadrupled since 2019, from $1.4 million to $5.8 million.
I would never trust an openly MAGA company.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-fi...
Now, I get it. The UK is not exactly providing good jobs for a lot of people, so of course we're seeing this. But, getting a mental health diagnosis, be long-term-sick and avoiding unemployment while both getting paid by an employer and getting unfair advantages out of the public health system ...
In the UK, long term sick leave with a mental health diagnosis is a way to be unemployed (ie. not working) but not have the disadvantages of that. There's the money difference: 530 pounds per month for sick leave, 338 or 425 pounds per month for unemployment. On long-term sick leave you get all advantages job seekers get (ie. "Universal Credit"), PLUS others (support for not being able to work, ESA, and support for extra living expenses due to long-term sickness, PIP). So if you don't want to work, long-term sick leave has many advantages (you can even put that you're working on your CV), plus it's a big cost to employers. You don't have to look for work in long-term sick leave. In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
2.8 million people are long-term ill, not participating in the workforce, not being economically productive at all, at least half due to being diagnosed with mental illness. The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
What the government is trying to do, in other words, is trying to kick people off, uh, let's say "mental disability", force them to work. And they need to do this without relying on government workers, because they often side with the people on sick leave.
Hence, Palantir. Being hated is a feature here, not a bug.
Why is that an issue? The simplest explanation is that the underlying rate of mental illness is inconveniently high. Which would tally with, as you say:
> In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
Also I would take a look at the date when the upcurve starts on that chart and ask myself: was there some sort of mass disabling event that happened about then? Might that be contributing?
(FTFY)
In my own experience consulting with factory owners—advising them on hardware choices like Lumens versus Mitsubishi—I see the physical reality. The idea of absorbing a client's database into an ontology and hooking it up to an LLM sounds great in theory. However, considering the extreme fragmentation of equipment standards and data representations across different sites, I seriously question if this is a sustainable business model.
Sure, initially it’s just dispatch programming. But how can they possibly absorb all these disparate, chaotic field environments into a single platform asset? Even within a single factory, different assembly lines use entirely different equipment, often from completely different manufacturers.
The idea of interpreting every piece of equipment's specific protocol, reverse-engineering the DB schemas, standardizing the terminology, and modeling the entire approval flow seems practically impossible. Is this actually achievable? Take PLCs, for example: even if they share a standard communication protocol, the ladder logic itself is completely incompatible across different brands
Thinking about it in reverse, Palantir might have absolutely no intention of solving this fragmentation problem themselves. Their survival strategy might be to dictate the core tech stack of the end-point B2C clients, creating a structure that essentially incentivizes specific B2B vendors to fall in line. Ultimately, what makes Palantir so dangerous is the high likelihood that they will simply shift the massive cost of standardization onto those B2B subcontractors