Police ordered to hide Palantir surveillance
Six police forces spent £7.8m on Palantir while a secret unit told them to deny it, an investigation has found.
Six police forces have spent £7.8m processing the public’s data through Palantir Technologies, the US data-mining firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, and a secret police unit has told forces to refuse to confirm or deny it. That is the finding of a joint investigation by the Good Law Project and Computer Weekly, published on 13 August, into how far Palantir has embedded itself inside British policing while telling the public almost nothing about it.
Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire and the Metropolitan Police have all signed Palantir contracts since 2023. Bedfordshire’s real spend is £2.9m, nearly four times the £750,000 figure it originally disclosed. Leicestershire removed details of its £800,000 deal from the public record after journalists filed freedom of information requests, only publishing them after a dispute reported by the Leicester Gazette. The Met’s officer-tracking contract was signed at £489,999, a figure that keeps it just under the £500,000 threshold requiring scrutiny by the mayor’s office.
NHS unit uses Palantir british police tools to say nothing Behind the under-reporting sits a deliberate mechanism. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Central Referral Unit has instructed forces to give “neither confirm nor deny” responses to FOI requests about Palantir’s use for “covert purposes”, reviewing more than 1,700 requests in three months in early 2025 alone. That directly contradicts UK policing’s own published promise of “maximum transparency by default” on AI systems. “The NPCC’s central FOI unit is a danger to transparency,” said Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch, who has also found requesters’ names used as case reference numbers, breaching FOI’s applicant-blind rule.
None of this happened overnight. Bedfordshire’s relationship with Palantir dates to 2023, and it now leads Project Nectar, a real-time data-sharing pilot with Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire that aims for a “single, unified view” across nine forces, with ambitions to go national. Separate regional systems, Athena and the East Midlands Special Operations Unit’s network, already link up to nine forces apiece. Behind all of them sits a planned 50-agency data-sharing infrastructure projected to cost £75m to £250m over five years.
Whose data, not whose contract
What flows through these systems is not limited to suspects. Impact assessments show the software processes race and ethnicity, political opinions, religious belief, trade union membership, health data, sexual orientation and criminal records, on victims, witnesses and children as well as those under investigation. Bedfordshire’s own internal memos acknowledge a “medium risk” of disproportionate data processing. “Palantir’s systems depend on bringing together vast quantities of data, and unless great care is taken in cleaning that data, biases which put people at risk are baked in,” said Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project.
Forces say the systems help catch serious and organised crime and protect children from exploitation, a case worth stating plainly even where the secrecy around it cannot be justified. London mayor Sadiq Khan tested that case in May, blocking a separate £50m Met-Palantir deal over procurement breaches and concerns about the firm’s “values and ethics.” Palantir is now suing to overturn that decision. It has not needed to wait for the result: in June the Home Office handed the firm a £9m contract to run the national firearms, explosives and poisons licensing system for all 43 forces in England and Wales.
Palantir’s UK chief, Louis Mosley, has told the Telegraph the firm already works with almost a dozen British police forces, nearly double the six the investigation could confirm. Nobody outside the company and the police themselves knows which figure is true.
