Comment It might take a particularly shameless company to grasp the opportunity presented by the UK's coronavirus pandemic and step in with a sales pitch. US spy-tech biz Palantir is willing to give it a go.

In a witness statement to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry [PDF], an ongoing independent public inquiry into the nation's response to the pandemic (in which around 208,000 people died), Louis Mosley, executive veep of Palantir Technologies UK, said the government should invest in a "common operating system" for its data, encompassing departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions and local authorities.

The government should "deploy this common operating system capability immediately and not wait until the next pandemic or civil challenge on the scale of COVID-19 is already underway. An investment of this kind is already long overdue," he added.

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who made his money and name by co-founding PayPal. It attracted early investment from the US Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and won early contracts in US defense and intelligence applications of its data analytics technologies, along the way supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency that has been accused of separating children from their families during enforcement actions.

Healthcare quango NHS England first started working with the US data analytics corporation in March 2020, during the height of the pandemic.

Palantir was initially handed a nominal £1 contract to work on a COVID-19 data store, along with cloud providers AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure, and Faculty, a UK AI company. Without open competition, its contract was expanded to a £1 million ($1.29 million) agreement, then a £23 million ($29.7 million) arrangement was signed in December 2020.

That deal was subject to the threat of judicial review from campaigners, who argued the contract represented such a change in data usage it warranted public consultation under British data protection law.

NHS England then extended the contract by six months for £11.5 million ($14.8 million), and awarded a £24.9 million ($32.1 million) deal to cover the one-year transition to a new Federated Data Platform, the £330 million ($426 million) project which Palantir won following an open competition.

In his submission, Mosley was keen to underscore Palantir's involvement in the government's response to the COVID emergency, including work to distribute ventilators, vaccines, and personal protective equipment.

Among the benefits of introducing the imagined data "operating system" across government would be the ability to "optimize procurement, among other things."

Maybe the company should be careful what it wishes for, though. The UK procurement for data analytics software seemed to be pretty well optimized toward Palantir winning contracts at the time of the COVID outbreak. ®