Reform Has Not Enlisted Tech Firms for Border Surveillance. The Current Government Has Done the Enlisting

A RECENT headline suggests that Reform UK is enlisting technology companies to help it surveil the border. That framing puts the cart well before the horse. The real story is that the current Labour government has already spent more than £5bn on private firms to manage border security and has embedded one of America's most controversial data-analytics companies at the heart of the NHS. Reform's policies are less an enlistment than an exploitation of infrastructure that the sitting government built.

The piece of evidence that matters most is not Reform's rhetoric. It is a £330m contract, awarded by NHS England in 2023, giving Palantir Technologies... control of the Federated Data Platform, the system that will link health records across England. The contract can be extended for up to seven years. A separate investigation by The Nerve found Palantir contracts across at least ten UK government departments worth at least £670m, including the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, the Financial Conduct Authority, and multiple police forces. Palantir landed in the NHS during the covid pandemic with a token £1 contract; it has since expanded into police, the military, and financial regulation. The strategy, in venture-capital parlance, is called "land and expand". In practice, it means that once the software is embedded, the question of how it is used becomes a political rather than a technical one.

Reform UK's home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, announced in February that a future Reform government would create a "UK Deportation Command" and launch "Operation Restoring Justice" to track down, detain and deport all illegal migrants. The party's policy document promises to "automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police". Reform did not build this data-sharing architecture. It is describing what becomes possible once the architecture already exists. Palantir's software already connects databases across government departments. The company tells its clients it can do "drag and drop" analysis across siloed systems. In America, ICE already uses Palantir to compile health, tax, and other records to target undocumented migrants. The Medact charity, which produces a briefing on these risks, warns that Palantir's NHS platform "could enable UK government departments, such as the Home Office and police departments, to more easily access patient data".

To be sure, Palantir denies that its NHS contract is designed for such purposes. A company spokesperson told the Guardian that using NHS data in the way Medact suggests "would be illegal and in breach of contract" and insisted that "how that software is used is entirely under the control of the NHS". Palantir also points to operational gains: 100,000 additional operations, a 12% reduction in discharge delays, and the removal of 675,000 patients from waiting lists. Those are not nothing. But the legal constraints Palantir relies on are what a future government could change. The software's capabilities outlast the legislation that currently limits them. Greater Manchester's integrated care board, which oversees health services for 2.8 million people, has deferred adopting the platform on the grounds of public-trust risk and value for money. More than 50,000 patients have written to local trust boards urging them not to adopt it. In June, Britain's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee urged ministers to break the contract, calling Palantir's role an "unacceptable point of weakness". The government is now reviewing the deal.

The deeper problem is not Palantir alone. It is the border-industrial complex. Research from the universities of Sheffield, York, Liverpool and Nottingham found that the UK government has funneled more than £3.5bn across 213 contracts to private companies since 2015 for border management, including small-boat interceptions, asylum processing and high-tech surveillance. Bristow Group received £1.96bn for search-and-rescue operations. Mitie Care and Custody was awarded over £500m for managing short-term holding facilities. Galliford Try received more than £170m for redeveloping detention infrastructure linked to the now-defunct Rwanda deportation scheme. An additional £1bn in tenders was open as of December 2024. The border enforcement industry is growing. Globally, it is projected to expand from $377bn in 2023 to $679bn by 2032. These contracts have done little to stop Channel crossings.

The incentive structure is clear. When the government commits to an unworkable policy - such as closing all legal routes to asylum and then punishing people for using the remaining ones - it creates a perpetual demand for enforcement infrastructure. Private firms then compete to supply it. The firms in turn have an interest in the policy never working perfectly, because a perfectly effective border would reduce the need for their services. The result is not accidental. It is built into the system.

It is tempting to blame Reform for making immigration more brutal. Reform's proposals are, to put it mildly, drastic. But Reform is not creating a border-industrial complex. It is describing what it would do with one that the current government has spent billions building. Labour's prime minister, Mr Starmer, has vowed to "smash the gangs" that profit from small-boat crossings. The university researchers who followed the money have done him a service: they have shown that the gangs are not only the smugglers. They are also Serco, Mitie, Galliford Try, Palantir and the rest.

The better answer is not to wait for a Reform government to activate the surveillance infrastructure. It is to dismantle the incentives that make surveillance attractive. That means opening capped, safe and legal routes for asylum, so that crossing the Channel is no longer the only option. It means auditing existing border contracts for effectiveness, not just for value for money. And it means asking, before any further data platform is embedded in a public service, whether its architecture makes future abuses easier rather than harder. A break clause exists in Palantir's NHS contract. The question is whether Labour will use it.

Politics is not only about what opposition parties propose. It is about what sitting governments build. The infrastructure of mass surveillance is not something Reform is assembling. It is something the current government has already installed. The danger is that it will be too late to remove it when the politics change.