After scaling back a previously planned joint project, a scheme has been launched focused solely on replacing the PND, a repository which contains about four billion items of ‘soft intelligence’
The Home Office has formally established a major project to transform a piece of “critical national infrastructure (CNI) that is reaching end of life”.
The Police National Database (PND) houses four billion items of data related to what is known as ‘soft’ intelligence, encompassing details of allegations or investigations which, ultimately, did not result in a charge. In 2016, the Home Office launched the National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP), which sought to implement a single nationwide system to replace both PND and the Police National Computer – a repository of 13 million people convicted of a crime, as well as records of 62.6 million vehicles and 58.5 million drivers.
In 2020 – and following various challenges and delays – the NLEDP was reduced in scope to focus solely on the PNC, with the replacement of the PND being removed from the project.
A dedicated PND programme was established in 2021. According to newly published scrutiny documents, such a scheme is necessary because “the PND is critical national infrastructure that is reaching end of life [and] will require replacing within the next three to five years due to end-of-service-life technology” – in particular “Oracle database and middleware” tools.
The latest accounting officer assessment of the project, released on GOV.UK last week, reveals, between February 2022 and September 2023, the scheme conducted proof-of-concept and design phases. The scheme has now proceeded into an implementation phase consisting of 15 milestones through which the project will “transform the [PND] system”, according to newly published scrutiny documents.
This will be followed by a fourth and final stage dedicated to “decommissioning the current system in favour of the newly transformed system”.
The assessment reveals that a full business case for the programme – dubbed the Police National Database 1.5 Transformation – was signed off by the Home Office earlier this year. The scheme has now officially been added to the Government Major Projects Portfolio, has ticked off its first three milestones, and will undergo another review this month by the Home Office Investment Committee.
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The assessment adds that the costs of delivering the programme “included within the funding arising from contributions to the Home Office for the provision of police IT services and from the department’s own resource” – meaning that the necessary spending did require approval from HM Treasury.
Ordinarily, this might mean that the scheme sat outside the major project portfolio but the “it has become a GMPP as it met the secondary criteria of being high risk, complex, CNI and repercussive”, the assessment says.
The transformation scheme’s objectives include “exiting Oracle and moving to cloud”. The migration to the Law Enforcement Cloud Platform will be scheduled to align with the “transition to a new contract for run, maintenance and support” of the PND. The current £70m deal to support the platform is held by IT services house CGI and expires on 31 March 2026.
The aim of the reform project is to “improve the usability of the system, [to] be intuitive and easy to navigate, with viewable and meaningful search results that can be exported and shared as required by operational policing”.
The improvements will include the implementation of new “PND APIs that enable export and analysis of PND data and expose APIs for federated searching across national police data sets”.
The ultimate ambition is to: “Enable PND to continue to act as a national source of info for organised crime, organised crime groups, including county lines, modern slavery, and human trafficking until such time as it replaced by the future data strategy agreed by policing and PSG (Home Office Public Safety Group).”
The assessment – which is undersigned by Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft, the project’s named accounting officer – forecasts net benefits of £308m, with benefits outweighing costs by a ratio of almost two to one.
The financial benefits delivered by the scheme will include almost £30m saved by reducing downtime, and £99m achieved by deploying an improved user interface
“Some of the benefits already delivered, such as bulk searching, could be greatly improved once the limitation of legacy systems and capacity constraints are removed,” the assessment adds.
Having been assessed against the four required criteria – regularity, propriety, value for money, and feasibility – the project has been greenlit to proceed.
The PND was originally established to comply with recommendations made in the Bichard Inquiry, which was held to examine child-protection measures in the UK in light of the Soham murders in 2002, in which 10-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were killed by school caretaker Ian Huntley.
