Public sector · NHS Trusts
Across the UK public sector, only 27% of organisations have a meaningful operational view of their services. For a Head of Data inside an NHS Trust, that is the shortest possible summary of 2026.
Those headline numbers from the 2026 UK public sector data trends report describe most NHS Trusts we work with. They explain why elective recovery feels slower than it should, why AI pilots stall, and why boards see plenty of digital activity but struggle to evidence measurable change in the new monthly NHSE productivity statistics.
Key takeaways
27%
Have an operational view of services
70%
Say data is fragmented, not interoperable
58%
Cite skills shortages as top barrier
£45bn
Annual modernisation savings unrealised
Integrated Care Systems are now the unit of accountability for population health. Trusts are expected to share data across organisational boundaries with primary care networks, mental health Trusts, community providers and ICBs. Most Trust data architectures were not built for that.
Snowflake's secure data sharing model removes the need to physically move patient data between organisations, which directly answers one of the biggest objections from clinical and information governance leads. Combined with Fivetran for system connection and DataOps.live for pipeline rigour, it gives Trusts a way to share data without giving up control of it.
The legacy on-premise warehouses still running across many Trusts cost more to maintain than they deliver, and they slow down every new analytics request. Modernisation in 2026 is no longer about innovation. It is about reducing cost, freeing data team capacity, and creating a foundation that supports analytics, AI and ICS data sharing without re-engineering.
Cloud-native platforms offer consumption-based economics, faster iteration and reduced infrastructure overhead. The capital case writes itself when framed as fewer outages, faster reporting and a single platform that supports population health and Trust-level operations.
The NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), delivered by Palantir, is now live across the acute sector. Boards and IT leaders are asking a reasonable question: if we have the FDP, why do we still need a Trust data platform? The short answer: they solve different problems, and choosing Snowflake at Trust level does not sit in tension with the FDP at national level.
FDP is the national layer. It supports elective recovery, vaccination, population health and supply chain optimisation across Trusts. It is not designed to be your Trust's data warehouse.
Trust-level data still lives outside the FDP. EPR data, finance data, workforce data and operational reporting all run off Trust infrastructure. Snowflake works there, cleanly.
Snowflake is cloud-neutral. It runs on AWS, Azure or GCP. It does not carry the political weight attached to the Palantir contract. That matters when boards, staff and communities are asking who holds NHS data and on what terms.
Snowflake is transparent on cost. Consumption-based pricing, not opaque enterprise licensing. Your Trust can see exactly what it costs, month on month, and turn workloads on and off as demand changes.
FDP and Snowflake are complementary. Feed relevant Trust data into the FDP for national programmes. Keep Trust operational, financial and clinical reporting on Snowflake. One does not replace the other.
"The question at Trust level is not Palantir or Snowflake. It is what you run inside your Trust to make sense of your own data, so the FDP has something useful to receive."
This is a real architectural choice, not a vendor war. Most Trusts already have a Microsoft tenancy and Power BI in place. Microsoft Fabric is the path of least resistance for a procurement team.
| Workload | Microsoft Fabric | Snowflake |
|---|---|---|
| BI-led analytics on Power BI | Strong fit | Works, but overkill |
| ICS data sharing without moving data | Limited | Strong fit |
| Waiting list / patient flow modelling | Constrained by capacity units | Elastic compute, strong fit |
| Multi-cloud portability | Azure-locked | Yes |
Power BI is a strong visualisation layer. The question is what sits underneath it. The right answer for most Trusts is rarely all-Microsoft or all-Snowflake. It is selecting the right tool for the workload and joining them through clean, governed pipelines.
Fabric's capacity-based pricing can look low at procurement and climb quickly as streaming data, ad hoc queries and AI workloads compete for the same capacity unit. Snowflake's separation of storage and compute gives Trusts cost transparency that makes the business case defensible.
Only 26% of governments globally have deployed analytics or AI partially or fully. The reason is rarely the AI itself. It is the underlying data: incomplete, inconsistent, fragmented, undocumented.
AI systems amplify whatever they are fed. In an NHS context that risk is bigger than in most sectors because poor decisions affect real patients. The Trusts moving AI into production in 2026 are the ones who fixed data quality and pipeline reliability first.
58% of public sector organisations cite skills shortages as a top barrier to digital transformation. Most Trust data teams are small and stretched. Recruiting senior data engineers is hard, and turnover hits continuity.
Platforms that need fewer specialist engineers, support familiar SQL skills and reduce ongoing operational overhead are no longer a "nice to have". They are a constraint on what your team can deliver. Snowflake's lower operational overhead and Qlik's governed self-service both fit that pattern.
Map the highest-cost, lowest-trust workloads first. Theatre utilisation, length of stay, waiting list tracking and demand forecasting are typically the workloads boards struggle to act on.
Frame everything in NHS terms. Waiting times reduced, staff hours saved, productivity targets met, capital eligible. Anything that looks like an ongoing service contract risks being deferred.
Treat data foundations as the AI enabler. Most Trusts pitched AI in 2025. The Trusts shipping AI in 2026 are the ones who fixed the data first.
Prove it before you commit
A 30-day Snowflake Proof of Value on your data. Two days of Catalyst BI consultancy. Real cost numbers. No multi-year commitment.
Book a POV scoping callKeep reading
For the full picture across the UK public sector, including all eight trends and the supporting research:
2026 UK Public Sector Data Trends →