How Britain's housing ministry escaped Palantir, and why the NHS probably can't

An obscure refugee-matching system shows what exit from an embedded vendor looks like. The conditions that made it possible are largely absent from the £670 million of contracts that remain. In September 2025, a team inside the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government switched off a piece of software built on Palantir's Foundry platform and switched on something they had written themselves. The transition went live without ceremony. Local authority caseworkers signed into a new interface, the data flowed, the Ukrainian families being matched with British hosts kept being matched, and the contract with the US analytics firm was allowed to expire. Seven months later, Coco Chan, a senior digital leader on the project, wrote a blog post describing what her team had done. It was careful, civil-service prose. It did not name Palantir. It noted that moving to the in-house model was "already saving MHCLG millions of pounds a year in running costs" and that the replacement, called…