Police IT is confused, fragmented and expensive

Will a new police-led company help to rectify this?

The police force's use of IT is "broken" due to a multiplicity of IT systems and contracts, according to a recent report by the Home Affairs Committee.

The New Landscape of Policing report heavily criticises the force's IT systems, pointing to problems such as 5,000 staff working on more than 2,000 different systems.

The report reads: "The home secretary noted that the police currently spend £1.2bn a year on information and communications technology, but said this did not represent good value for money."

Terry Skinner, chair of the Justice and Emergency Services Information Communication Association Group at Intellect, told the Home Affairs Committee that the "police overspend on IT by at least 20 per cent", which means an overspend of about £240m.

Effective ICT systems in the police force are vital for policing, the report suggests, as it supports the front line through items such as PDAs, the middle office through criminal records databases and crime mapping, and the back office through HR, finance, accounting and payroll systems.

"A factor contributing to the problems with IT procurement in the police service, and a significant problem in its own right, is the fact that different forces are using different IT systems, many of which are incompatible with each other," the report reads.

"IT across the police service as a whole is not fit for purpose, to the detriment of the police's ability to fulfil their basic mission of preventing crime and disorder. The Home Office must make revolutionising police IT a top priority."

The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is the body responsible for delivering the Information Systems Improvement Strategy (ISIS), which aims to see hundreds of systems replaced with nationally available services, where forces will pay for use on a consumption basis.

It is hoped this will eliminate the problem of each force owning and operating its own ICT, which has led to mass duplication and investment.

However, the NPIA is due to be phased out during 2012 and it is not clear how a new organisation will drive change in ICT.

"A successor must be found for many of the information and communications technology functions that [NPIA] fulfils. This provides an additional urgency to the imperative for a new approach to police information and communications technology," says the report.

The report highlights that the influence of a review conducted by a special adviser, Lord Wasserman, will make up a "core part of the decision" made by the minister for policing and criminal justice and the home secretary, with regard to the scope of IT in the police force and who will be responsible.

However, Lord Wasserman is an unpaid adviser to the government and will not publish an official report, which has meant that the Home Affairs Committee has largely had to infer what changes will occur and how a new body will implement them.

The report has made inferences based on an announcement made on 4 July 2011 by the home secretary at the Association of Chief Police Officers' conference, where she said the government would help to set up a "police-led ICT company" that should be based on the following principles:

• The company should be police-led;
• It should be staffed by ICT professionals; and
• It must exploit the purchasing power of the police service as a whole.

The new company will be set up by the spring of 2012 and be led by Lord Wasserman. It is expected that although the new company will be partly owned by the police, the Home Office and the private sector might own shares in it too.

The details around this new police-led body are still sufficiently vague and the report identifies a number of challenges and priorities it should address, including the fact that it should continue to pursue the convergence of IT systems and contracts across the 43 forces.

However, many of the forces have different end dates for their current IT contracts, which could negatively impact transition plans.

The report says: "There is so little detail currently available about the police-led IT company that we find it difficult to reach a conclusion about its viability. The people setting up this body have a great deal of work to do in a short space of time."