London mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked a proposed £50 million Metropolitan Police contract with US technology company Palantir Technologies after City Hall identified what it described as serious breaches of procurement rules in the deal process.
According to reporting by The Guardian, the Metropolitan Police had been negotiating a two-year agreement to use Palantir’s artificial intelligence tools to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. The contract would have been the company’s largest policing deal in Britain.
The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which must approve large contracts, refused authorisation after concluding that Scotland Yard had effectively engaged with only one supplier and failed to demonstrate value for money. A spokesperson for Khan said Londoners expected public money to be spent with companies that “share the values of our city”.
Kaya Comer-Schwartz, deputy mayor for policing and crime, wrote to Met commissioner Mark Rowley that she regarded the procurement failures as “a clear and serious breach of the applicable procedural requirements”. She warned that the process had created “legal and reputation risks” for both Scotland Yard and the mayor’s office.
City Hall said the Met had not secured approval for its procurement strategy and raised concerns that the force risked becoming dependent on Palantir’s systems. Comer-Schwartz highlighted that the contract had initially been estimated at £15m to £25m a year and that the proposed agreement sat at the top end of that range.
The dispute comes as scrutiny of Palantir’s role in British public services intensifies. The company holds more than £600 million in UK public sector contracts, including agreements with NHS England, the Ministry of Defence and the Financial Conduct Authority. Campaigners and MPs have criticised the company over its work with the Israeli military and US immigration enforcement agencies.
Palantir has sought to defend its record in Britain. Louis Mosley, the company’s UK chief executive, has said its NHS data platform helped deliver 110,000 additional operations and reduce discharge delays. Other police forces using the company’s software have credited the technology with speeding up investigations involving large volumes of mobile phone evidence and foreign-language material.
Khan’s intervention creates difficulties for the Labour government’s push to expand artificial intelligence in policing. Home secretary Yvette Cooper said in January that police should adopt AI “at pace and scale”, while ministers have committed £115 million towards developing national policing AI capabilities.
