Should the NHS scrap its £330m Palantir contract and seek a UK alternative?

For a question that touches the always-toxic mix of the NHS, big data and an American tech firm, the vote came in surprisingly close to a coin toss, with three in five backing scrapping the £330m Palantir deal. That's a verdict, not a landslide, and the texture beneath it explains why: this was never quite the settled consensus critics of the contract might have hoped for.

The clearest fracture ran along gender lines, with men splitting roughly two-to-one for cancellation while women were, if anything, marginally more inclined to keep it. Age told a messier story than the usual "young sceptics versus older traditionalists" script — the 25-34 bracket divided evenly, while both the youngest and the 45-54 cohort voted yes almost to a person, though on numbers too small to lean on hard.

The fault line here isn't really about the NHS at all — it's the now-familiar argument over Silicon Valley's grip on British public data, sharpened by Palantir's own reputation and the government's broader unease about foreign tech dependency post-Brexit. A break clause looming in 2027 means this isn't an abstract debate; someone in Whitehall will have to decide for real.

Even those persuaded to walk away from Palantir, in other words, weren't wholly convinced there's a better home-grown alternative waiting.