The Met wanted Palantir. City Hall said no.
City Hall blocked the Met Police's £50m Palantir AI contract over procurement concerns. The decision raises wider questions about surveillance, policing technology, and democratic oversight of data contracts.
The Met Police wanted to hand Palantir a £50m contract for artificial intelligence work. City Hall blocked it.
That is the immediate story. The larger one is more serious: one of Britain’s most powerful police forces had moved towards embedding a military and intelligence-linked data company inside criminal investigation work.
What City Hall stopped
The proposed deal would have used Palantir software to automate intelligence analysis for the Met. According to reporting cited by the Canary, the mayor’s office intervened after raising serious concerns about the way the contract had been handled.
Kaya Comer-Schwartz, London’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, said City Hall had not been given an acceptable explanation for what it regarded as a serious breach of procurement requirements.
The Met said it was disappointed. Palantir defended its record, saying its software is already used in public services, including the NHS, defence, and work to protect women and children from domestic violence.
That is the company’s argument in miniature: it presents itself not as a surveillance contractor, but as a public-service efficiency tool. The problem is that policing is not a hospital waiting list. Criminal intelligence is coercive state power.
Why Palantir matters
Palantir is not an ordinary software supplier. Its origins lie in the US security state. Its products are used by the US military and immigration authorities, and the company says its systems are used by Israeli defence and security bodies.
In Britain, Palantir already has major public contracts. It has been awarded work with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence. The blocked Met deal would have extended that reach into Britain’s largest police force.
This is how infrastructure is built: not by one dramatic law announcing a surveillance state, but by procurement decisions, pilot schemes, databases, and contracts whose social meaning is hidden behind words like “efficiency” and “analytics”.
Once such systems are embedded, they become hard to remove. A police force reorganises its workflow around the software. Officers are trained on it. Data formats are built around it. Future contracts become renewals rather than decisions.
That is why the procurement question matters. If only one supplier was seriously considered, as City Hall alleged, then a democratic decision about policing technology was narrowed before the public ever saw it.
The missing argument
Khan’s intervention focused on process. That matters. Public bodies should not be able to drift into huge contracts with politically sensitive suppliers without proper scrutiny.
But process is not enough. The public question is not only whether the Met followed procurement rules. It is whether police intelligence work should be handed to a company whose power comes from fusing large datasets for states, armies, and security agencies.
Britain already has a long record of over-policing poor, Black, Muslim, migrant, and protest communities. Giving the Met more powerful analytical machinery does not land on neutral ground. It lands on top of existing patterns of suspicion and coercion.
Every new surveillance system arrives wrapped in promises: faster investigations, safer streets, less paperwork. The people most likely to be watched rarely get a vote.
Public services or private power
Palantir’s expansion across the NHS, defence, policing, and media infrastructure points to a deeper political problem. The British state is becoming dependent on private technology firms for the basic machinery of government.
When that happens, democratic control weakens. The code is proprietary. The contract is commercial. The operational detail is hidden behind security and procurement language. Ministers and police chiefs can say they remain accountable, while the actual system becomes harder for the public to inspect.
City Hall’s block on the Met contract is welcome. It should not be the end of the matter.
Parliament should require full publication of public-sector AI and data contracts, including supplier selection, data-sharing terms, audit rights, and human-rights assessments. Police use of such systems should require a democratic mandate, not just a procurement sign-off.
The Met did not just try to buy software. It tried to buy a new layer of state power. The fact that City Hall caught the process problem should make us ask why the political problem had been allowed to get this far.
Sources
- The Canary (lead)
- The Guardian (corroboration)
