London mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked the Metropolitan Police’s £50 million contract with the US technology company Palantir, citing what City Hall called a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules.
The deal, which would have been Palantir’s largest in British policing, was intended to use the company’s artificial intelligence to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. However, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), which must approve contracts of this size, withheld its approval after concluding that Scotland Yard had failed to follow proper procedure.
The procurement failings
Mopac found that the Met had “seriously engaged with only one potential supplier” – Palantir – meaning the market had not been tested to ensure value for money. In a letter to the Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, the deputy mayor for policing and crime, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, said she had been given “no acceptable explanation” for the failure to obtain prior approval for the procurement strategy.
“I regard this as a clear and serious breach of the applicable procedural requirements,” she wrote, adding that the process had created “legal and reputation risks” to both Scotland Yard and the mayor.
Value for money was a further concern. The Met originally estimated the two-year contract at £15 million to £25 million per year. After negotiations with Palantir, the proposed deal came in at the top of that range, and Mopac was not satisfied the cost could be sustained over both years without “unacceptable adverse impact” on other budgets. Khan’s office also warned that the force risked becoming “locked into Palantir’s technology”.
The legal framework governing public procurement does not allow a company’s ethics to be formally considered. But a spokesperson for the mayor said Khan would raise with the government the question of whether that should change, adding that Londoners wanted public money to go to companies that “share the values of our city”.
Palantir’s expanding reach in UK public services
The blocked deal is the latest flashpoint in rising public and political concern over Palantir’s widening presence in British public services. The company, co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, already holds more than £600 million in contracts with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority and several smaller police forces.
Palantir’s UK chief executive, Louis Mosley, has been engaged in a highly public campaign to rebut criticism. He claims the company’s NHS system, part of a £330 million contract for a Federated Data Platform, has helped deliver 110,000 additional operations and a significant reduction in discharge delays. However, critics have raised concerns over patient data privacy, vendor lock-in and the company’s ethics. The British Medical Association has voiced opposition, and some NHS staff have described Palantir as “evil”, questioning whether patients will trust the system. The contract’s value is reportedly set to exceed £1 billion over its first seven years.
Palantir also won a £421 million deal with the Ministry of Defence and has a contract with the Financial Conduct Authority to bolster fraud detection. The company recently announced a £1.5 billion investment to establish the UK as its European headquarters for defence, creating 350 jobs.
The company’s work with the Israeli military and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drawn repeated criticism. Last month its chief executive, Alex Karp, published a mini-manifesto extolling the benefits of US power and implying some cultures were inferior to others – remarks one MP called “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
Met Police’s earlier Palantir trial
Mopac also examined a recent Met Police trial that used Palantir’s AI to monitor staff behaviour in an attempt to root out corrupt and failing officers. The trial was awarded directly, without advertisement or open competition, and its value fell just below the threshold that would have required City Hall’s approval.
Scotland Yard heralded the trial as a success, saying it led to hundreds of officers being investigated for misdemeanours, including abusing the computerised roster system, falsely claiming they were in the office, and failing to declare they were Freemasons. The Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, has called the surveillance an “outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy” and is considering legal action.
Government’s AI push in policing
The mayor’s intervention will be a blow to the Labour government’s ambition to accelerate the use of AI in policing. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, urged forces to “ramp up use of AI” and adopt the technology “at pace and scale”. The government is investing £115 million to create a national centre, sometimes dubbed “Police.AI”, designed to identify, test and scale AI technology across all 43 forces in England and Wales.
Other police forces already using Palantir’s AI have reported transformative results. Bedfordshire Police credited the system with helping to bring down an organised crime gang that looted £800,000 from cash machines. Officers have described being able to rapidly process mountains of evidence from mobile phones, including foreign-language translations.
Mopac has said it wants to work with the Met on “a new procurement at pace” and there appears to be no block on Palantir bidding for a similar contract in the future.
Scotland Yard and Palantir were approached for comment.
