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I think you mean £20 billion for that latter figure. This is largely because a significant amount of assets are held in ISA's (£20k a year contribution per person allowed) , or via personal property which is capital gains exempt or in a pension which is again, capital gains exempt.

Thus only the wealthiest are outside these boundaries, and they often will not liquidate holdings until their death to pay inhertiance tax, or in trusts which will liqudiate over decades as they can pay inheritance tax over a very long period.

This is not to mention the large amounts of off-shore holdings.

"dumb". Call it what it is, corruption

Don't care. I don't want any of the wankers over there at Palantir involved with the NHS.

(source: a UK voter)

The truth is that the NHS is very bad not due to funding, but for structural reasons.

The fact I can't even see a GP I'm not registered with (not even an option to pay extra) is ridiculous. You have absolutely no control over your health at all.

With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.

As someone who largely worked at startups and smaller companies before joining the NHS it genuinely confused me how no one would ever say no to anything when I first started working there.

The projects I worked on were genuinely absurd... My team alone spent millions on things that literally wouldn't have made any difference to the quality of healthcare in the UK.

Apparently we were given a budget and we had to find a way to spend it otherwise it would be cut. At any normal company we should have all immediately have been made redundant.

The rate of increase of healthcare funding for the UK is 2,000% higher than France's rate of healthcare funding increases from between 2010 and 2019, according to World Bank data.

The UK healthcare system is uniquely incompetent, administratively bloated and drives very suboptimal value for money.

UK citizens appear to be in a collective delusion about the NHS that allows them to continue ineptly bumbling through mediocrity while perpetually fleecing more tax money to line the pockets of administrators.

Meanwhile actual frontline workers in the NHS are completely ripped off in salary. Nurses get paid peanuts, while even neurosurgeons earn less than 1/6th of their American counterparts.

To plug the gap by skilled healthcare workers bailing over these horrific conditions, the UK has been importing people to fill these gaps, often with severely lower competence (usually because of completely faked qualifications or outright fraud [1]).

[1] https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/hundreds-of-nhs-nu...

But they'll pay even if it doesn't deliver.

AND they're putting private information at risk by working with Panantir

as often the case with eternal consultants it probably won't deliver, plus the NHS will be perpetually on the hook for maintenance

this isn't a "delivery" product, it should be an institutional pillar of the system

The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations.

It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.

Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"

There's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution

> I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is.

Yep, as someone who's worked at a couple of small startups trying to sell into the NHS, it's terrible. A big part of the problem seems to be that there's no centralised procurement: each trust (of which there are ~200) does their own precurement. And a lot of the companies (the big established players are the worst) at most pay lip service interoperability. So you end with a big mess of system that don't talk to each other.

And they're not setup to pay "market rates" that are competitive with private employers to their in-house developers. So it's hard for them to attract and retain good in-house developers where they have them (although there are still some great people working there).

Internal restrictions are such that even aspiring software Devs find hurdles to doing basic automation. I know someone who wanted to use python, yes just use it, and it took months to be allowed to do that on an NHS machine.

Imagine the kind of open source EPR that could be built with £330 million.

But it looks like lobbying by US corporations has resulted in the NHS quietly deleting it's open source policy https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/12/nhs-england-quietly-re...

> is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence

Is there no one in the UK with any competence?

> who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT?

Why on earth do you think that's Palantir?

> but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it

Until the US government wants it, at least.

> but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it

So would I and I think Palantir will leak it.

People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Your comment implies any behavior against the interests of a corporation is somehow a sin. This is such a gross take.

> The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS.

Could you be a bit more specific? No IT initiative at all? No attempt to create a national data spine?

Or, the non politicized take is that they think the software could improve the data landscape of the NHS, which, if we are bring honest, has a lot of room for improvement.

An almost literal "No True Scotsman" fallacy, IRL.

Boring comment. Let’s say things that add value to the conversation please.

There have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir.

Definitely not a conflict of interest...

The NHS's actual current annual budget is £195.6B in 2025/2026 [1]. The contract value declared at the link given above is £182M over 5 years. So:

100 × ((182/5)/196000) = 0.019%

Which, to me, still seems too high a number for a data management function: I make it about 1000 persons-worth of per-capita GDP.

[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/financial-performance-u...