What do the Home Secretary’s policing reforms mean for the future of the Police Digital Service? | JP
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has become a landing zone for Whitehall’s various digital functions since the new government came to power in July 2024.
Responsibility for running the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) has transferred from the Cabinet Office to DSIT, but it seems the government’s digital reshuffle might not be over yet.
On 19 November 2024, home secretary Yvette Cooper released a statement about the government’s plans to take a more “active leadership role” to restore the public’s waning confidence in UK policing.
“Confidence in policing has fallen in recent years,” she said. “Visible neighbourhood policing has been decimated. At the same time, crime has become more complex, and policing lacks the systems and technology to respond. Police, and the public they serve, need a system that is fit for purpose and fit for the future.”
The policing sector needs to be reformed, she continued, to ensure it can operate effectively and efficiently – and so that local forces can improve the level of service they provide to the public.
The statement outlines the various actions the Home Office will take to achieve its goals, including the creation of a National Centre of Policing (NCoP) that will have IT in its purview.
“We are determined to work with policing to consult on the creation of a new National Centre of Policing to bring together crucial support services, such as IT and forensics, that local police forces can draw upon, to raise standards and improve efficiency,” it said.
The Home Office’s involvement in UK police IT
What is notable about this is that the Home Office already has a hand in directing the UK’s policing sector’s technology use, through its funding of the privately owned Police Digital Service (PDS).
According to the most recent set of accounts, filed with Companies House on 28 November 2024, the Home Office National Police Capabilities Unit provided PDS with a £32m grant during the financial year ending 31 March 2024.
Previous accounts from PDS have neglected to provide details of the exact size of the grants or funding the Home Office has provided the organisation with.
However, JP understands the department defines the £32m grant as being a single-year funding stream, issued on the “basis of need”. As such, there are no guarantees PDS will receive a Home Office grant from one financial year to the next.
For context, during the financial period this grant was issued, PDS made a loss of just over £1m in 2024, having posted a profit of £2.4m in 2023. Its staffing costs also increased from £11.9m to £20.4m during the same 12-month period.
The organisation is tasked with the development and delivery of the National Policing Digital Strategy, which is focused on enabling forces through technology to tackle increasingly complex crimes and, in turn, improve public safety.
With the Home Secretary emphasising the need for more efficiency in policing, does it make sense for two organisations with similar-sounding responsibilities to exist when there is a risk that they could be duplicating efforts?
PDS reform
Owen Sayers, an independent security consultant and enterprise architect with over 20 years’ experience in delivering national policing systems, told JP back in mid-July 2024 that he expected the new Labour government would seek to reform PDS when they came to power.
Several months on and it appears his prediction could be coming true, with Sayers now of the view that PDS, or at least its responsibilities, will most likely end up getting folded into NCoP. “I do not doubt the Home Office will seek to build on the work that PDS has done thus far, just as the new administration has lifted the entirety of the CDDO and GDS and placed them into DSIT to ‘continue their good work’ and ‘rely on their expertise’,” he said.
That said, PDS does “carry significant baggage”, he continued, which might make it difficult for the government to “base any new central service upon them”.
To this point, two individuals working for PDS were arrested and bailed in July 2024 on suspicion of bribery, fraud and misconduct in public office – and within two weeks of this news being made public, the organisation’s CEO – Ian Bell – resigned.
The organisation has also been heavily and repeatedly criticised in the past for championing the use of US-based hyperscale cloud services by the policing sector, despite there being a persistent misalignment between how these platforms operate and the policing sector’s own data protection laws.
“PDS, in particular, has overseen and promoted adoption of technologies that breach UK data laws, and that’s not a great CV,” said Sayers. “In addition, there remains serious questions as to whether a body packaged as a profit-making limited company, operating in the heart of government, is an acceptable model to build upon.”
Particularly one that is losing money and receiving multimillion-pound grants from the government. “Making a loss for a public body is nearly as bad as making a profit,” he added.
Invoice data
Invoice data from public sector market watcher Tussell shows that – despite reporting a loss of over £1m for the 12 months to 31 March 2024 – PDS brought in £29.6m of business.
JP contacted the Home Office for clarification on what the creation of NCoP means for the future of PDS, but the department did not directly answer the question.
JP also contacted PDS to see if it had received any indication from the Home Office about what the creation of the NCoP means for its future, and received a statement in response from its interim CEO, Tony Eastaugh.
There is no detail in the statement about how PDS and the NCoP will be expected to coexist, but Eastaugh said his organisation “hugely welcomes” the prospect of the NCoP’s creation, describing it as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for the policing sector to “design, build and deliver a new construct” that will make communities safer.
“PDS exists solely to support our policing colleagues in that mission – and so we welcome the prospect of being asked to bring our skills, experience and expertise to the discussions on how digital, data and technology in law enforcement needs to look over the coming years,” he said.
“It’s genuinely an exciting opportunity for all of us to deliver tangible change – and PDS is fully committed to doing everything it can to help build that new body with colleagues from across the sector.”
The need for reform
On the same day Cooper’s statement about the need for policing reform went public, she gave a speech at the National Police Chiefs’ Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners annual conference, where she shared a few more details about the NCoP’s remit.
“As a starting point, I see this body [NCoP] taking on responsibility for existing shared services [and] national IT capabilities,” she said, having talked about “outdated technology holding policing back” earlier on in her speech.
As an example of this, she pointed to the 50-year-old Police National Computer (PNC). “It was cutting-edge when I was five,” said Cooper.
The government is already working with the sector to create a “collaboration and efficiencies” programme that will seek to cut the costs of IT contracts, among other things, in the interests of saving “hundreds of millions of pounds over the next few years” that can be reinvested in frontline policing, she continued.
“[We’re also] working with you on tackling the bureaucracy that drags policing down – including reforms on redaction, and use of new technology – to free up more time for officers to get back on the frontline,” said Cooper.
Expanding on this point, she said technology procurement is an area that every force wrestles with repeatedly, “with the same questions about new software, IT changes or records management – wasting time, pushing up costs and creating news systems that aren’t even interoperable”.
“Instead of technology driving great leaps forward in policing, too often it is holding policing back,” said Cooper.
Technological changes
Calum Baird is a digital forensics incident response consultant at managed security services provider Systal Technology Solutions, who previously served as a detective constable specialising in cyber investigations for Police Scotland. Speaking to JP, he said there are myriad ways that forces are hampered in their ability to fight crime and protect the public because of IT limitations, but also because of how quickly changes to the technological landscape occur.
“Legislative change can take time, and often technology advances at a faster pace, [and] this means that police and legal professionals have to identify how potentially criminal acts fit into existing legislation,” said Baird.
“[Also] think about recent advancements, such as generative AI, cryptocurrency and cloud computing – many of which lack explicit mentions in existing legislation,” he said.
At the same time, forces are often on the back foot when it comes to tackling online forms of crime, because officers need a mix of both investigative and technical skillsets to do so effectively.
“These can be a challenge to develop individually, and even more challenging to develop continually,” said Baird. “Investigative skills take time to develop in law enforcement, and whilst they can be taught, much is learned through practical experience.”
“Cyber security technical skills [as an example] can be developed, but require considerable dedication and often funding to do so,” he said.
What the future holds
For the time being, it remains to be seen how PDS will fit in with the Home Office’s vision of what the future of policing should look like.
However, Secon Solutions’ Sayers said the Home Office would be wise to “turn back the clock” and seek inspiration from how IT was delivered across the policing and criminal justice sector during the latter stages of the last Labour government. “[Back then] the UK had services that were internationally considered to be at the leading edge – both in terms of their technology adoption and exemplars of good governance,” he said.
Sayers cited the Labour government’s early 2000s “Joined-Up Justice” Criminal Justice IT (CJIT) programme that sought to link up the IT systems used by the police and court system. The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) was another example called out by Sayers.
The latter was a non-departmental public body created in 2007 that was set up to support police by providing expertise in IT and data-sharing, among other areas. It closed down during the 2012–2013 financial year.
“During NPIA and CJIT’s tenure, they introduced over 30 national systems, and a host of lesser-known, but still critical, public safety systems,” he said.
“They worked hand-in-hand to deliver on the joined-up justice agenda, reflecting the reality that criminal justice has many participants, but that for the bulk of cases, the data journey begins in policing,” said Sayers. “This means if the integrity of the data or IT is compromised there, it will never regain good provenance, and the justice process suffers accordingly.
“Rebuilding police technology has to be recognised as foundational to rebuilding all justice IT, and requires organisations to be modelled more on NPIA and CJIT models than police-centric structures like PDS,” he added.
More specifically, Sayers said he would like to see the NCoP change the direction of travel for policing IT, which has seen the sector develop a growing reliance on the US-based cloud hyperscalers, despite their services being “wholly unsuitable” for police and justice use.
“Those technologies are familiar, popular and helped the UK to manage Covid, but the pandemic is behind us now, and we need to build technology platforms suitable for a more diverse operating future,” he said. “Tactical decisions hastily made to address times of urgent need are rarely the right fit for strategic use and growth.
“That is, however, exactly where we are today in policing – where systems born out of our need to react to Covid are being increasingly built upon to form, and constrain, our future thinking,” said Sayers. “We need to be brighter than that.”
We also need the policing sector to start adopting technology offerings that are “optimised for UK laws” because they are built by homegrown providers.
“This does not mean we revert to monolithic and non-interoperable systems … nor should we continue to invest in single-provider technology stacks that lock UK criminal justice into generic commercial services requiring us to compromise on the UK’s mandatory security and vetting requirements – or require UK laws to be changed for use,” said Sayers.
“Whatever the NCoP’s form, it should be tasked to include delivery of a future technology landscape that is based on open standards and federated services, and can provide services at a national scale independent of a reliance on a primary supplier,” he said.
“The next five years can see a renaissance of UK-bred justice technology innovation, but only if the government are brave enough to choose to do so.”