Technologies Inc.’s newest UK executive, a former deputy leader of the governing Labour Party, lobbied the nation’s health minister to argue that the US data firm would strengthen Britain’s tech industry, just weeks before it secured an extension to a controversial new contract.

Tom Watson, who joined Palantir in September, sent a letter that month urging Health Secretary Yvette Cooper to keep the company’s National Health Service work intact.

“I want to ensure that Palantir UK rises to meet the government’s new social-value tests and helps build Britain’s sovereign technological capability,” Watson wrote in a letter viewed by Bloomberg. He added that Palantir was “investing heavily” in the UK, where he wrote that nearly a fifth of its global workforce is based.

In the weeks since the letter, the UK government has decided to extend Palantir’s £330 million ($441 million) NHS contract for two additional years while searching for a potential British software firm to replace the work, according to people familiar with the decision.

The decision to approve Palantir’s extension was made by the Department of Health and Social Care, led by Cooper. Watson and Cooper were Labour MPs at the same time for 18 years and both served in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Palantir obtained the extension despite loud calls from critics, including politicians, in the UK and across Europe to ditch the company’s software in a bid to curb a dependency on US technology and national security tools.

Even though UK ministers will launch a fresh procurement process for portions of the NHS contract, they won’t exclude Palantir from participating, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the plans. Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP and former software engineer who’s been vocal in criticizing the UK’s reliance on Palantir, said Watson’s letter and social media videos “fail to make a coherent case for the use of Palantir.”

“The government announced new criteria for considering a company British,” Wrigley said.

“Considering the low level of corporation tax that Palantir’s UK office pays, I’d be surprised if they count.”The UK’s health department referred to a written statement earlier this week from junior minister James Frith, who wrote that the deal “will be reviewed in line with standard contract management processes and the outcome will be announced in the normal way in due course.”Palantir declined to comment. The contract extension was first reported by the Financial Times and the Times.

Palantir was awarded the NHS contract in 2023 to develop a “federated data platform” that consolidated and analyzed health records. The contract has become a cornerstone of Palantir’s effort to expand outside of the US, which accounts for more than 83% of the company’s sales.

Yet the firm’s close ties with the Pentagon, the Israeli military and the US Department of Homeland Security have made others wary about adopting its software.

This summer, the UK’s tech committee asked the government to break the NHS deal, citing Palantir’s political positions and the dangers of being overly reliant on American technology.

In June, French officials revealed plans to swap Palantir’s intelligence software for a domestic rival, barring the US provider from future tenders. Across the rest of Europe, the firm’s government agreements face mounting pushback as a new generation of local startups emerges and aims to rival its artificial intelligence capabilities.

In his correspondence with the health secretary, Watson wrote that hospital performance and patient outcomes have shown marked improvements after the implementation of Palantir’s analytical tools.

During the contract discussions, Louis Mosley, who leads UK and European operations for Palantir, sent separate correspondence to Cooper pointing to NHS England data as evidence of the software’s efficacy.

However, those statistics represented only a narrow selection of hospital trusts and omitted comparisons with non-participating sites. Just five days prior, NHS England pledged to contextualize the metrics to clarify they did not prove direct causation after a review by the UK statistical regulator.

Watson said in a post on X that the intervention was “fair enough” because “hospitals are complicated places, and there might be other things affecting those results.”He added that the government has to decide whether to continue with the data platform before there are more concrete studies on its benefits.

He has recently posted social media videos addressing what he called the “myths” around Palantir’s NHS work, including claims that the company mischaracterizes health data.

On Tuesday, at a Bloomberg Tech event in London, Mosley said that the NHS work was a “highly performing” contract.

The executive requested meetings with several ministers, including Cooper and her predecessor James Murray, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg. Neither minister appeared to have responded to those requests.

Earlier this week, Palantir projected its slowest quarterly growth in over a year, causing its shares to fall.