My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Scriven. I have signed Amendment 423, but I support all his amendments and those of my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire in this group.
My noble friend Lord Scriven has set the scene for the reason why these amendments are needed, with the background of the Boardman recommendations. I want to give one example of how the culture has allowed one particular firm to get its feet very firmly under the NHS desk over the last three years—it is now a bit more than three years—and why, had stronger conflict of interest arrangements been in place that did not permit very senior staff to go and work for someone who is about to bid for NHS contracts, in line with these amendments, we would have benefited.
In April 2020, the United States tech firm Palantir was awarded a contract for an NHS Covid datastore under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework. This meant that it did not need to be publicly tendered or the results published. During 2020, campaigning organisations Foxglove and openDemocracy, as well as a number of parliamentarians in both Houses, including my noble friend Lord Scriven and me in the Lords, raised repeated concerns about the contract. It then emerged that part of the cost-effectiveness of this contract was that Palantir bid very low in return for access to every patient’s medical and personal data held on the Covid datastore. No permission had been asked for or given by any individual about this highly confidential data, and of course it breached GDPR—that is not formally within the scope of this Bill.
The first contract, from April 2020, was for three months, and the value of that contract in return for the data was £1—not £1 million but £1. A further continuation contract for a further four months was for £1 million, and in December 2020, a two-year contract was issued, again under the same arrangements, for £23 million. As details started to emerge, and after the public outcry, the contract was ceased in April 2021—not least because Foxglove and openDemocracy had initiated a court case against the Department of Health and Social Care.
What has emerged is that, in 2019, a number of private meetings were held between senior NHS managers and senior managers of Palantir, described by the NHS managers as very positive—I bet they were. A November 2021 National Audit Office report on government contracts during the Covid pandemic found that a lack of transparency and adequate documentation was very evident.
During 2020, Palantir did not just have contracts with the NHS, it had contracts worth £46 million with UK government or public bodies. Palantir, which in
conjunction with Cambridge Analytica provided data support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and for the Vote Leave campaign, is known for working below the radar. I am very mindful of the comments that the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, made earlier about people gaming the system.
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After the Covid data scandal, Palantir undertook to be more transparent, so it was astonishing to read on 22 April this year in the Health Service Journal that Indra Joshi, the NHS head of artificial intelligence, left the NHS at the end of March and in mid-April joined Palantir. One week later, Harjeet Dhaliwal, the deputy director of NHS England data services, also left and also immediately joined Palantir. At that time the NHS had said publicly that it was about to tender for a £240 million NHS datastore contract. Six months on, that contract has grown to £360 million.
In September—just last month—NHS England’s interim chief data and analytic officer, Ming Tang, admitted that NHS England had failed adequately to engage trusts in plans for this bid and said that procurement rules were partly to blame. When she was asked about Palantir and the possible conflict of interest, Ms Tang said:
“Palantir is one of the providers that I am sure will be bidding for this work”.
The noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, referred in the previous group to organisations and people gaming the system. This one case has become very public due to campaigning organisations being very concerned about the spending of public money below the radar under special contract arrangements.
The Palantir saga—this is only part of its NHS contracts; there are many more—shows that without specific conflict of interest rules, which the NHS just does not have, firms will be able to get a head start. I suspect that across the UK there are many other public bodies or agencies that will be required to follow the rules being set out in the Bill which may have the same arrangements. Leaving it to good fortune, or hoping that people believe in the ethics of conflicts of interest, is not good enough. That is why I support the amendments. In particular, if the Government are not prepared to accept them, we really need to consider whether Clauses 74, 75 and 76 should stand part of the Bill.