Five-year contract follows London setback as former Met chief Cressida Dick emerges as a paid adviser
Three UK police forces led by Cambridgeshire Constabulary have awarded Palantir a £10.1 million contract after London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a separate deal with the Metropolitan Police.
The five-year agreement covers Bedfordshire Police, Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and Hertfordshire Constabulary, despite warnings from campaigners and politicians about dependence on the supplier.
A contract award notice says the east of England police forces expect the Palantir platform to provide "an enterprise-wide data integration and analytics capability, enabling the secure ingestion, linking, and analysis of data from multiple systems and sources across the policing environment." The contract runs until October 2031, with the estimated value covering all three forces.
News of the award coincided with revelations that former Metropolitan Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has worked as a paid adviser to Palantir since September 2025.
A Palantir spokesperson told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: "Dame Cressida is advising us on how our software could help improve the delivery of services in the public sector, drawing on more than 40 years of public service in a variety of roles."
Dick said her role was limited to advising on how such products could assist public services. She said she had never lobbied or advocated for Palantir, or introduced the company to her contacts.
Dick led the Metropolitan Police, the UK's largest force, between 2017 and 2022. She left after Khan said he had lost confidence in her. She later said she was "intimidated" into leaving.
Separately, Khan stepped in to block the Met from awarding a £50 million contract to Palantir. His office cited serious concerns about the procurement process. Palantir later sued the Met, but the case was settled in October.
The new police contract award follows a report from MPs warning of vendor lock-in to US suppliers, including Palantir. It said: "Our view that Palantir's increasing presence across the public sector represents an unacceptable point of weakness is not ideologically motivated or driven by concerns about the quality of their products.
"The government should retain the ability to pick and choose individual suppliers and safeguard against the risk of vendor lock-in and debilitating dependencies, particularly in areas of critical national importance such as healthcare and national security infrastructure." ®