Where do England's ICBs stand on the Federated Data Platform?

The NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) has been one of the most talked-about pieces of NHS digital work since NHS England awarded the contract to Palantir in November 2023. It is meant to connect data across hospitals and local systems, so staff can plan care, manage waiting lists and get patients home sooner.

National platforms only succeed if local organisations use them. So in spring 2025 I set out to see how England’s integrated care boards (ICBs), the local NHS bodies that plan and pay for services, were responding.

What I was trying to find out

I read through board papers, strategies and public statements, and grouped ICBs roughly into four tiers: early adopters piloting the platform, those supporting it, those cautious about it, and those saying nothing in public.

Looking back, my method had a weakness I should be upfront about. Board papers are a poor guide to what organisations are actually doing. Much FDP work happens at trust level, through national agreements, and never reaches an ICB board agenda. Silence in public papers did not mean an ICB was not involved. My original version suggested most ICBs had not engaged at all, and later figures show that was wrong.

My May 2025 list, checked against today’s figures

Here is the list as I published it in May 2025, with a column added showing where each ICB stands in NHS England’s current list of organisations live on the FDP. Several ICBs merged in April 2026, so the last column gives the merged ICB where that applies. A merged ICB being live does not tell you whether the older ICB was.

Two corrections to my original list. It included “West Midlands” as an ICB, but there was no ICB of that name, so I have taken it out. And it left out two ICBs altogether: Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire, and South Yorkshire. Both are now live.

What did stand out

Some areas were early and keen. North West London, for example, used an FDP-based tool called OPTICA to track patients’ discharge status across hospitals and councils, so discharge teams could see delays in one place.

Some were openly sceptical. Greater Manchester had already built its own advanced analytics and questioned whether the national platform would add anything. Its board decided not to adopt the FDP for the time being.

Most were somewhere in between. They acknowledged the national direction while protecting their own local investments.

Why this matters

The real story here is a long-running tension in NHS policy. Should local systems build data tools that fit their own populations, or sign up to shared national platforms that make comparisons and joined-up care easier?

I have worked on both sides of that question over 27 years in NHS data programmes. National platforms can stop every area reinventing the same wheel. But they can also override local tools that already work, and local teams who know their own data best.

There is a second question underneath: how much of the NHS’s core data infrastructure should depend on a single private supplier? I look at the trust side of that in a separate comment piece, “Who’s watching the watchers?”. You can also see what choices you have over your own data in my guide to NHS data choices.

How each ICB balances local autonomy against national integration will shape not just the FDP, but digital health in England for years to come.

Update, October 2026

• Almost every ICB is now on board. In June 2025 NHS England told Healthcare Leader that 41 of the then 42 ICBs had signed up. Its figures for the end of May 2026 show 35 ICBs live on the FDP (after the April 2026 mergers), along with 139 hospital and other trusts.
• Even in May 2025 uptake was wider than my piece suggested. NHS England said then that more than 120 trusts had signed up, including 84% of hospital trusts, and 72 were live.
• Greater Manchester is still holding out. In November 2025 its board deferred again, saying it wanted more evidence that joining was in its population’s best interests. It was the only ICB to defer.
• The contract is under review. The government has said it will decide whether to extend Palantir’s contract ahead of a review point in February 2027.