White paper sets out proposals for National Police Service that will take the lead on serious crime as MPs bemoan forces’ ‘fragmented’ leadership and IT systems, and outdated performance information
Plans to centralise police technology procurement and oversee strands of work such as digital forensics through a new National Police Service will save hundreds of millions of pounds that can be targeted towards crime-fighting, the Home Office has said.
The measures are included in the white paper From Local to National: A New Model for Policing, which also proposes a series of mergers that will “dramatically” reduce the number of police forces in England from the current 43.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s vision for restructuring policing argues that creating the NPS, with a national police commissioner, will “attract world-class talent” and provide state-of-the-art technology to fight complex and serious crimes.
The white paper says frontline policing will save £350m over the next three and a half years by scrapping outdated procurement approaches under which each force often buys technology, equipment and clothing in isolation.
It says the new NPS will take on responsibility for shared services, equipment and IT, and will “buy equipment once on behalf of all”, saving money through economies of scale and reinvesting the savings back into policing. As part of the reforms, Blue Light Commercial and the Police Digital Service will be “rolled into” the new national service.
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The delivery of police forensics will also be consolidated under the NPS. The Home Office said that creating a “nationally managed capability” would allow new technologies and best practice to be rolled out faster and more consistently.
It said demand for specialist digital forensics means there are normally 20,000 devices awaiting analysis at any time and that the reformed service will deal with these backlogs and help the police keep up with the pace of change in technology.
The white paper also proposes the creation of a new National Centre for AI in Policing, to be known as Police.AI, that will create a platform for identifying, testing and scaling artificial intelligence for policing, backed with £115m of funding over the next three years.
Other measures include the rollout of new AI tools which will help forces identify suspects from CCTV, doorbell and mobile phone footage that has been submitted as evidence by the public.
According to the Home Office, there will also be a five-fold increase in the number of live facial recognition vans, meaning 40 additional vehicles will be available to forces in England and Wales.
Elsewhere, the white paper pledges to introduce “mandated national standards” on data in a bid to reform the current system of individual force-level decisions on technology and data, which results in a “patchwork quilt” of systems, standards and processes, according to the document.
The Home Office said it would work with forces to “create a framework for mandating clear national data standards in a timely way, to improve how data is collected, recorded and used across England and Wales, and make sure these standards are applied across all forces and the systems they use”.
It also proposes to create a “single, national decision-maker” with authority over key national datasets, such as the Police National Computer, who will make managing those datasets “simpler and more consistent”. The role is expected to sit within the NPS.
Separate to the white paper, the Home Office last week announced a £750,000 contract with Hertfordshire-based data-management specialist Datalynx that will see the firm help with the development of “new capabilities to ingest data from policing to support enhanced analytics”.
Datalynx already carries out a wide range of work with police services. The Home Office said “various capabilities” are available and that the anticipated seven-month project would support a best-value-for-money decision using data already held by Datalynx in its proprietary system.
Productivity problems
The policing white paper came as members of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee published the findings of an investigation into efficiency in the police, based on a report by the National Audit Office last year.
The committee said evidence it heard highlighted inefficiencies related to individual forces running standalone procurement exercises and a lack of standardised equipment across the nation.
MPs also complained of performance data “scattered across different organisations” and likely to be out of date, as well as of “fragmented IT systems”.
Additionally, they said the Home Office’s “focus on numbers of police officers, rather than effectiveness” had left chief constables unable to fund specialist staff to support IT modernisation, while officers performed tasks that could be given to civilian staff.
Committee chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said the policing white paper was an opportunity to drive reform that “cannot be wasted”.
“Anyone attempting to track overall police financial resilience and performance enters a maze of siloed and out-of-date information,” he said. “This is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for a government which we have found already lacks insight into the impacts of its policy changes on under-pressure forces and for the wider public, who ought to be able to more easily hold police forces to account for how they carry out their duties.
“The Home Office must learn from its past attempts and address the fundamental barriers to improving productivity.”
Clifton-Brown added: “With better information, both government and police forces will be more able to grip the current problems which our report illustrates – a concerning uptick in poor wellbeing for officers; difficulties in recruitment and retention; a lack of consistency in how equipment and technology is used and taken up.”
