Met chief says London will be ‘less safe’ after Khan blocks Palantir police contract amid pressure over IDF links

Sir Mark said that, because of shrinking budgets, the decision would mean the Met’s overall staffing would have to be cut by 1,150, on top of reductions in previous years.

He told Sky News: “I'm having to shrink the Metropolitan Police because of our budget, so we've shrunk by 3,300 people in 3 years. We're going to lose another 1,150 people this year.

“We had a plan to avoid doing any damage to the policing of the streets by using technology to automate behind the scenes, as well as improving what officers could do.

“Now that's been blocked, we're going to be taking between 500 and 700 officers out of frontline services equivalent…. 500 to 700 officers and staff who were part of delivering services to London, maybe from call handling through to street policing, we're going to have to reduce that.

“That will have an effect on the streets of London. That's why we were trying to do a sort of rapid tech procurement to make a difference for Londoners.”

Asked directly if that would mean London was less safe, he replied: “Well, we're going to be smaller at the end of the year. So it'll be less safe at the end of the year than it was otherwise.”

Palantir claimed that Khan’s ban on the Met deal was a “politicised decision”, and confirmed that their lawyers have written to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) to inform them that they intend to challenge the decision in the courts.

The US tech firm is used for defence work by both the Israeli military and the Trump administration, resulting in a number of Labour politicians calling for the company to be stripped of its public sector contracts.

The firm is already operating within the NHS, where its Federated Data Platform (FDP) has led to positive results in areas such as cancer diagnosis, increases in theatre use and fewer delays in discharging patients.

But Tom Bartlett, who led the NHS data engineering team that developed the FDP, claims his former colleagues in the health service were “afraid to speak out” because of fears of a backlash.

Mr Bartlett told the Daily Telegraph: “There’s a culture of silence and a culture of fear around the people who are engaged in delivering the FDP.

“They have felt afraid to speak out. They’ve been advised by their management not to speak out, not to be publicly a voice in favour of FDP.”

Mr Bartlett, who has founded Bartlett Data since leaving the NHS and has no affiliation with Palantir, is a former deputy director for NHS England, working for 22 years within the NHS and led the data engineering team that built and delivered the FDP.

He said he had spoken to colleagues who had “been followed down the street by protesters”, while another had been heckled by pro-Palestine activists.

He went on: “Another colleague that I spoke to has tried to present the benefits of the work that they did in an open forum of analysts and was heckled as being a genocide supporter.

“He told me that he was scared of identifying himself in case his car gets keyed, in the way Tesla cars were keyed when Elon Musk was being controversial.”

Labour ministers have already opened the door to ending the NHS’s £330m data deal with Palantir when the break clause comes up next March.

Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, said she wanted to see greater backing for British companies and criticised the “right-wing” views of Palantir’s bosses.

Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK and grandson of British Union of Fascists founder Oswald, said: “The FDP is a significant and long-overdue transformation programme to give the NHS the technology it deserves.

“We welcome scrutiny and keeping a contract under review is good practice but, as the government does this, I would strongly encourage it to resist any urge to put politics before patient outcomes and move the NHS backwards.”