A trove of internal UK government documents disclosed to the Bureau has revealed that Palantir, the controversial US tech giant running the NHS's Covid data store, had launched a charm offensive to sell its services to NHS chiefs as long ago as summer 2019.

Palantir, once funded by the CIA and known in the US for its involvement with defence and immigration agencies, shot to prominence in the UK last March, when it was given an “emergency” contract by the NHS to assist in handling the coronavirus pandemic, for an initial cost of just £1 (now a longer-term £23.5m deal).

But emails seen by the Bureau show that discussions between Palantir and NHS chiefs about how the company could work with patient data were underway throughout the second half of 2019, months before the pandemic hit... The pandemic has thrown an urgent spotlight on how profit-seeking companies interact with Britain’s National Health Service – in particular any access that could potentially be granted to its “crown jewels”, a £10bn-a-year cache of patient data – with the government having handed out a series of emergency contracts to the private sector since the crisis hit.

... “New processes, infrastructures and partnerships have been set up to analyse data during the pandemic – but speed has often come at the expense of oversight and transparency,” said Dr Natalie Banner, who leads the Understanding Patient Data initiative. “There’s now an opportunity to radically rethink how to build trustworthy systems for managing data, if decisions about how to move forward are made in the open..."

NHSX and NHS England declined to comment when contacted by the Bureau. Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.