PRIME Minister Andy Burnham’s government has brought in Boston Consulting Group, the US firm that helped set up the foundation that ran the Gaza aid sites where Israeli forces massacred starving Palestinians, to advise on its 10-year plan.
The appointment comes days after it emerged that ministers plan to extend the NHS contract of Palantir, the spy-tech company that supplies Israel’s military.
BCG will advise on the plan, the Times reported. The plan has been billed as part of Burnham’s pledge to end decades of neoliberalism and may now slip from December into the new year.
The government said the firm is providing a single consultant whose support is limited to ‘specific specialist advice’. BCG previously employed Burnham’s chief of staff, James Purnell.
‘Aside from an obvious point that you don’t appoint companies like the Boston Consulting Group if you have any actual intention of ending 40 years of neoliberalism, Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” blueprint is clear ethnic cleansing and the idea that Andy Burnham has invited these people into the heart of Downing Street shows contempt for the victims of the genocide,’ said Green Party leader Zack Polanski. ‘They must be removed from this project.’
The firm’s record in Gaza was laid out in a Financial Times investigation published in July 2025. More than a dozen BCG staff worked for seven months on a project code-named Aurora, under contracts worth more than $4m.
The firm helped establish the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and supported the private security company attached to it.
It also built a financial model for the scheme’s Israeli backers that costed the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. One scenario had more than 500,000 people leaving with relocation payments of $9,000 a head, about $5bn in all.
The model assumed that a quarter of the population would go and that three-quarters of those would not return. It calculated that moving a Palestinian out of Gaza was $23,000 cheaper than supporting one there through reconstruction.
That modelling fed a slide deck titled The Great Trust, drawn up by Israeli businessmen and shared with the Trump administration, which proposed a ‘Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands’ of resorts and artificial islands.
Two staff from the Tony Blair Institute took part in discussions on the project.
The GHF opened its four militarised sites in late May 2025, after Israel had cut off all supplies to Gaza for 11 weeks.
By 7 July, the UN human rights office had recorded 615 killings in the vicinity of those sites. More than 170 humanitarian organisations demanded that the scheme be shut down.
BCG said in July 2025 that two of its partners ‘provided pro bono support to help establish an aid organisation intended to operate alongside other relief efforts’ and ‘failed to disclose the full nature of the work’, then ‘carried out subsequent unauthorised work’.
It sacked both and later stripped two more senior figures of their leadership roles. Save the Children suspended a partnership with the firm dating from 2006, its chief executive calling the Gaza work ‘utterly unacceptable’. Liam Byrne, chair of the Commons business and trade committee, wrote to BCG’s chief executive demanding a full timeline.
In August 2024, BCG agreed to forfeit $14.4m to the US Department of Justice, whose investigation found that the firm’s employees paid bribes between 2011 and 2017 to win contracts from Angola’s economy ministry and national bank.
Leaked documents had earlier shown that its work on the Angolan state oil company was paid for through a Maltese company owned by Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the then president.
In Saudi Arabia, a 2018 New York Times investigation reported that BCG advised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s foundation and held a contract to overhaul procurement, finances and personnel at the defence ministry, while the Saudi-led coalition was bombing and blockading Yemen.
BCG is not the only US contractor with a hand in Israel’s war on Gaza that the government is keeping close. Ministers plan to extend Palantir’s £330m contract for the NHS federated data platform (FDP) when its break clause falls due in February.
A review concluded that removing the firm and switching providers within four months would be too disruptive, the Financial Times reported, and ministers are instead drawing up plans to potentially replace it with a British alternative in two years’ time.
Tech justice group Foxglove said the decision showed ‘a serious ignorance’ of the contract, which ‘specifically requires the firm to provide bridging support for up to 24 months if the contract is ended’. Its head of communications, Tom Hegarty, said: ‘The reported claim that it would not be “practical to replace Palantir within the next four months” is, frankly, nonsense.’
NHS England says 137 hospital trusts are benefiting from the platform. Freedom of information responses gathered by the health workers’ group Medact, and first reported by the Guardian, show that 29 of those trusts say the platform is not live or that they are not using its applications.
University Hospitals of North Midlands replied that the platform was not live, adding: ‘We do not intend to roll it out in the future.’ Mersey Care, Epsom and St Helier, and Kent and Medway also said they were not using it.
The statistics regulator had already told NHS England in July to quote its figures more accurately. NHS England has conceded that it cannot show cause and effect between the platform and the extra operations it advertises, and a separate freedom of information request found that nearly a third of the trusts using Palantir’s scheduling tools were carrying out fewer procedures than before.
The Commons health and social care committee urged ministers in July to drop Palantir at the break clause, and the British Medical Association has told doctors not to use the platform.
Health workers blockaded Palantir’s Soho Square headquarters in December 2023 and NHS England’s headquarters in April 2024. Protests were held at London hospitals including St Thomas’ on 1 October. Health workers plan to hand a petition to Burnham in Whitehall on Thursday.Palantir has written to MPs who criticise it. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Labour MP Rachael Maskell received letters in June from the firm’s UK chief, Louis Mosley, listing what they had said about the company in the Commons, Novara Media revealed.
Corbyn said the purpose was ‘to intimidate its critics into silence’. In September the firm hired former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson as a senior vice-president. In April, a senior NHS official had told an analytics officer who raised concerns: ‘If you criticise the FDP one more time, you are going to lose your job.’
Health workers campaigning against the contract cite the company’s record abroad. Palantir entered a ‘strategic partnership’ with Israel’s defence ministry in January 2024, three months into the genocide in Gaza.
UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese named it in her 2025 report ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’. A biography of chief executive Alex Karp published last year states that Palantir software was used in several Israeli raids in Gaza, in the 2024 operations in Lebanon and in the pager attacks there, which killed dozens and wounded thousands.
Confronted by a protester who said the technology kills Palestinians, Karp replied: ‘Mostly terrorists, that’s true.’
Elsewhere, in the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir a $30m contract in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS, a system for tracking people marked for deportation. Germany’s constitutional court ruled in February 2023 that laws in Hesse and Hamburg allowing police to mine personal data with Palantir software were unconstitutional.
In England, NHS England planned to give staff from outside companies including Palantir ‘unlimited access’ to identifiable patient data in one part of the platform.
Amnesty International’s UK crisis campaigner Tom Guha said: ‘Patients, healthcare workers and campaigners have pushed ministers to look for a way out of this contract. Ministers must show Palantir the door now, not give it two more years to bed in further.
‘Palantir has publicly acknowledged supporting Israel’s military in “war-related missions”. Any company linked to genocide has no place in our NHS.’
In Warsaw on Sunday, demonstrators marched on the presidential palace against a proposed deal to supply Poland’s defence ministry with Palantir’s Maven military software.
