Select committee inquiry
National Law Enforcement Data Programme
Closed
What the inquiry looked at
“The Home Office’s National Law Enforcement Data Programme was created to replace the Police National Computer, the national record of data on arrests and missing or wanted persons, and the Police National Database, which facilitates sharing of intelligence between forces. These systems are vital to police operations and are used by all 45 police forces and many other law enforcement agencies. Early in 2021 it was reported that the Police National Computer had suffered a data loss with the accidental deletion of thousands of records. The Committee has warned, in previous inquiries, on the Home Office’s “miserable record of exorbitantly expensive digital programmes that fail to deliver ”. It will question senior officials at the Home Office on whether National Law Enforcement Data programme is likely to meet user requirements and deliver technology that is likely to work , progress against time and budget, and the remaining risks to successful delivery. If you have evidence on these questions please submit it here by 6.00pm on Thursday 9th September 2021”
The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.
What it found
In the committee's words, from the summary of Twenty-Ninth Report - The National Law Enforcement Data Programme ↗
The Home Office (the Department) has overseen some challenging technology and digital projects in recent years. The Emergency Services Network and Digital Services at the Border programmes are examples of critical projects which have suffered from severe delays and cost overruns, this latest project does not give the committee any comfort that the Department is learning from past mistakes.
Over the last five years, the Department has wasted both vital time and scarce funding without making any meaningful progress in replacing the Police National Computer (PNC) and the Police National Database (PND). Under the Department’s current plans, a replacement for the PNC is not expected to be available until at least 2025–26, more than five years later than the original delivery date of 2020, while total costs to the Department have increased by a staggering 68% to £1.1 billion. The Department now plans to upgrade or replace PND by a separate programme, but it is unclear when this will happen and at what cost.
The PNC is vital to all aspects of police work and their efforts to prevent crime and protect the public from harm. The PNC is reaching the end of its life and requires urgent replacement. While newer, the PND also needs to be replaced. In 2016 the Department began a programme to replace the PNC and the PND, aiming to create a single cloud-based system combining the data and functions of both - the National Law Enforcement Data Service (NLEDS) programme. While the challenges of delivering national programmes for the 45 police forces across the United Kingdom have long been recognised, the Department and the police did not develop the effective working relationship needed to enable the development of NLEDS, with the former Senior Responsible Owner of the programme conceding that the police had in the past lost confidence in the Department’s ability to deliver the programme. The Department has now recognised that more effective working with the police is fundamental to the successful delivery of NLEDS and other technology programmes in its portfolio and has changed tact via the announcement of a new ‘partnership’ approach, with policing now involved in all decision-making at every level.
Despite the failure of NLEDS to deliver meaningful benefits to the police, and several negative evaluations of its progress, the Department did not take decisive action to recover the programme until late 2020. This reset required the programme to take a different, iterative approach to its delivery and has led to changes in its senior leadership.
It is not yet clear that these changes will put the programme back on track to deliver. It remains to be seen whether the Department’s new approach to working with police and its more iterative approach to developing the technology will mean that NLEDS will be ready to replace the PNC within the revised timetable. We will revisit the Department’s progress next year.
What the government said
The government responded on 1 March 2022. The deadline was 8 February 2022.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response.
The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on each of the six recommendations, with acceptance of the first made "on the basis of" its own planning approach.
- On the delivery roadmap, the department plans to share key programme milestones with forces alongside a more detailed annual plan, updated each quarter on a rolling basis, and to provide a further update in April 2022.
- On oversight, the programme board has been strengthened with senior Home Office officials since September 2021, and engagements with the Permanent Secretary "will take place every six weeks".
- On the PNC, the department says a re-platforming option exists, and it will "formulate an action plan" on or before 30 June 2022 to determine "whether and when" to trigger it. Should it be initiated, NLEDP would be paused and "postponed for a further 2 to 3-year period".
- On the PND, its business case is due before the Finance Investment Committee on 10 March 2022, with an update to the Committee in April 2022 once approved. A further £6.5 million has been allocated for 2022-23.
Read the government's response ↗ Read the report ↗ Report an error
How the inquiry ran
Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 1 September 2021 to its close on 1 March 2022. The dashed mark is the deadline Parliament records for the government's response.
- Oral evidence 16 Sep 2021
- Report 8 Dec 2021
- Government response 1 Mar 2022
- Correspondence 25 Oct 2021
What it recommended 6 recommendations · 27 conclusions
2The Department made poor decisions at the outset of the NLEDS programme and, despite signs...
Recommended (the committee's words)
The Department made poor decisions at the outset of the NLEDS programme and, despite signs it was going badly, was slow to make the necessary changes to correct this. The original scope and ambition for the NLEDS programme was unrealistic. The Department created a programme designed to replace two vital police information systems without fully understanding the police’s requirements or how these systems worked. The PNC had evolved over several decades as it was adapted and expanded. When the programme team attempted to understand how the PNC worked, it became clear that it was much more complex than the Department had anticipated, resulting in delays and large amounts of additional work. An early programme decision to merge the PNC and PND systems made the complexity worse because the two systems used very different data formats. As the consequences of these issues became apparent, a series of internal and external reviews highlighted that NLEDS was at risk of not delivering what the police needed. Despite these warnings, the Department did not step back to assess the fundamental problems that the programme had encountered, and its first programme reset in 2019 was not effective in addressing these problems. Following the second programme reset in late 2020, the Department then took several months to decide whether to proceed with the programme. Recommendation: The Permanent Secretary should ensure that he and other senior staff have sufficient regular oversight of NLEDS from now on, to ensure that he can quickly see problems as they arise and be prepared to take early and decisive action to recover or restructure the programme.
3Working effectively with the police is critical to the delivery of NLEDS and other technology...
Recommended (the committee's words)
Working effectively with the police is critical to the delivery of NLEDS and other technology programmes, but it is not yet clear that the Department’s new approach will resolve longstanding challenges in delivering national programmes for local forces. We recognise that the challenge of managing relationships with 45 operationally independent police forces to deliver a national programme is 6 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme a significant one, but the Department and police have long been aware of this. Contrary to good practice in other bodies such as the NHS, the Department failed to establish a joint vision with police until two years into the programme. As costs increased and the programme failed to deliver any meaningful capability in its first four years, police users lost confidence in the Home Office’s ability to deliver NLEDS and other technology programmes, to the point where the police’s most senior officers wrote to the Permanent Secretary to raise their concerns. The Department has now belatedly changed its approach to working with the police and is aiming to establish a partnership approach rather than a customer-supplier arrangement. The Department recognises that police forces may require additional funding to adopt the NLEDS system and will need to address this in the forthcoming Spending Review. Recommendation: The Department needs to carefully monitor its new partnership approach to ensure it enables joint and timely decision-making with the police. The Department should write to the Committee in six months with an update on the new working relationship and whether further changes will be required.
4The police must continue to rely on the PNC for another five years, despite the...
Recommended (the committee's words)
The police must continue to rely on the PNC for another five years, despite the risks to its availability. The PNC is the most important law enforcement technology system in the UK, and it is vital that it is constantly available to police and other users. Given its age, the current system is remarkably reliable. However, the PNC experienced a significant data loss in January 2021 and the knowledge of how it works has become harder for the Department to maintain. It is difficult and expensive to recruit people with skills and experience in the ageing technology used by the PNC. The team that maintains the PNC is under-resourced and several staff are nearing retirement, which means it is difficult for the team to run the PNC and also support programmes like NLEDS. The Department currently plans to run this piece of critical national infrastructure without full manufacturer support for the database after 2024, meaning it will not have that support for at least a year, though the Department plans to provide in-house support instead. Recommendation: Alongside its Treasury Minute response, the Department should set out for the Committee how it will guarantee that police will be able to access the PNC service until NLEDS is ready. This should include a full assessment of the risks of continuing to run the PNC and contingency plans for failure. This plan should include a review point at which the decision to replace the PNC’s operating system can be taken promptly.
5The Department does not yet have a plan for maintaining the PND and combining its...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department does not yet have a plan for maintaining the PND and combining its data with NLEDS in future. The Department has changed its plans for integrating the PND with the NLEDS programme several times, and it has now been excluded. The PND, introduced in 2011, is nearing the end of its original lifespan and will need a technology update. The Department intends to establish a separate five-year programme to update the PND, but this will not begin until
6There is a risk that the Department still lacks the capacity to prioritise and deliver...
Recommended (the committee's words)
There is a risk that the Department still lacks the capacity to prioritise and deliver major digital programmes on time. In common with many other government departments and agencies, the Department is reliant on a range of legacy technology systems that need updating or replacing. We have seen several major programmes to deliver such replacements encounter major problems and require resetting, for example the Emergency Services Network and Digital Services at the Border programmes. The Department’s failure to deliver NLEDS is another example. The Department has tried to do too much at once and has failed to prioritise programmes or develop the skills it needed to adopt ‘agile’ methods. It did not understand challenges posed by complex legacy systems and police forces’ operational independence, even though it should have been clear that these were present. In its evidence the Department recognised that it needs to be better at saying ‘no’ to unrealistic technology programme proposals. The Department has now made some changes to improve how it involves police users in such programmes and plans to use the NLEDS as a pilot for its new approach, which can then be applied to other police programmes. There is a clear risk that the Department still lacks the programme, technical and commercial skills needed to identify realistic timetables for its major programmes. Recommendation: The Department must be realistic about how long it will take to deliver major programmes, given the skills and capabilities and funding available. It should require all SROs of major programmes to report annually on how they will manage any gaps between the skills and capabilities required to deliver and those available in their programmes. The Department should write to us in six months’ time with an update on how this is being implemented. 8 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 1 Resetting the programme
1On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence...
Concluded (the committee's words)
On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office (the Department) and from the Department’s Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the National Law Enforcement Data Service (NLEDS) programme. We also took evidence from the Department’s previous SRO for the programme and from its previous Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer (CDDTO).1
7The Department told us about its new engagement model, with more iterative delivery intended to...
Recommended (the committee's words)
The Department told us about its new engagement model, with more iterative delivery intended to enable quicker release cycles, so that capability gets into the hands of police forces more quickly.9 Where previously the Department had been looking at release cycles of around 12 months, it said it was aiming to reduce them to around three months or less for products, so that the certainty of delivery would be higher.10 When asked about its confidence in delivering the programme by 2025–26, the Department said that its recent work on the reset and the new engagement model had given it “increased confidence of deliverability of this programme going forwards”. It added that it had a 12-month rolling plan and had identified the initial six products that would be delivered.11 When asked about longer-term milestones, the Department said it had a rolling one-year timescale of milestones, on which it could give the Committee further detail and update us in future.12 It said it was looking ahead not over the next five years, but a year ahead from every quarter, which was why it was confident about the progress for six products over the next 12 months, but would then “update that as we go.”13 After our evidence session the Department provided us with its ‘roadmap’ covering progress of its first six product areas up to the end of quarter 3 (September) 2022.14 We have re-produced some key parts of that ‘roadmap’ in Figure 1. We expect to return to this subject to see whether the Department has progressed with these products as planned, and look forward to regular updates being provided to us.15 6 C&AG’s Report, paras 16, 3.18 7 C&AG’s Report, para 2.17 8 Q 52; C&AG’s Report, paras 2.17, 3.18 9 Qq 39. 47 10 Q 38 11 Q 47 12 Qq 48, 51, 52 13 Q 90 14 Letter from Home Office Permanent Secretary to PAC Chair 7 October 2021 15 Q 52 10 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme Figure 1: Extracts of the Home Office’s October 2021 ‘roadmap’ looking ahead 12 months for the first six produ
8The Department told us that it has also retained what it called a ‘no-go option’...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department told us that it has also retained what it called a ‘no-go option’ for the programme, whereby it could still decide to transfer the PNC on to a different platform, but without getting the same benefits of transformation, such as being cloud-based. It The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 11 said it was confident in the benefits of its new approach which allowed more flexible and gradual adoption, force by force. But the programme remained complex and technically challenging, with obstacles that could get in the way, and so it was retaining this option as the “ultimate fallback”.16
9One of the critical success factors for the programme is having the right people in...
Concluded (the committee's words)
One of the critical success factors for the programme is having the right people in place to deliver it. The programme depends on access to the PNC team but that team lacks capacity to support other programmes as well as manage the PNC, and this issue has caused delays.17 Key staff on the PNC team are approaching retirement, while the specialist skills and knowledge required to maintain the PNC make it difficult for the Department to recruit and train replacements.18 The Department emphasised the difficulties of finding people with the niche skills required, such as working with coding language from the 1970s. It pointed to having carried out various recruitment activities, recent and ongoing, and to having restructured the programme team over recent months.19 We registered our concern that it had taken the Department so long to be getting to grips with an issue about the skills needed to deal with an old legacy programme, when the need to do so should have been clear from the start.20 Poor decision-making about the programme
10There were numerous reasons for the Department’s failure to deliver the NLEDS programme to the...
Concluded (the committee's words)
There were numerous reasons for the Department’s failure to deliver the NLEDS programme to the originally expected timetable. These included: • The Department and the police did not have a consistent shared understanding of the programme, with the focus of the programme changing several times; • The Department did not prioritise the programme’s funding relative to other law enforcement ICT programmes, resulting in short-term funding shortfalls every year from 2016 to 2019; • The Department changed several fundamental aspects of the NLEDS technology as the programme progressed, resulting in additional work and expenditure; and • The Department’s management approach, with multiple contractual relationships, produced a bureaucratic culture and inefficient development process.21
11By early 2018, the Department had recognised that the programme would not deliver as originally...
Concluded (the committee's words)
By early 2018, the Department had recognised that the programme would not deliver as originally planned. It had underestimated the amount of work required and the effort remaining was unaffordable within the allocated budget. In June 2018, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) reviewed NLEDS and concluded that delivery of the programme appeared to be unachievable. The Department began its first ‘reset’ of NLEDS in early 2019. By autumn 2020 the police had lost confidence in the programme and, in response, the Department began a second reset, which is still being implemented.22 16 Qq 48–51 17 Q 94; C&AG’s Report, Figure 9 18 C&AG’s Report, para 3.7 19 Qq 94, 95 20 Q 96 21 C&AG’s Report, paras 9–12 22 C&AG’s report, paras 13–14, 1.13 12 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme
12The former SRO for the NLEDS programme acknowledged that the Department should have come earlier...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The former SRO for the NLEDS programme acknowledged that the Department should have come earlier to the stage where it stepped back, stopped work and considered more fundamental choices about how to proceed. He described how the Department had under-estimated the complexity it expected to find within the old PNC system. For example, it anticipated that asking the system to show a person’s driving licence would be relatively simple, perhaps involving up to five business rules, but it turned out to involve
40The lack of documentation for the PNC meant that the Department repeatedly came across such...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The lack of documentation for the PNC meant that the Department repeatedly came across such surprises.23 The Department’s former CDDTO added that “our real error was that we underestimated the complexity.”24 Working with the police forces
13The operational independence of UK police forces is a key challenge for the Department’s implementation...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The operational independence of UK police forces is a key challenge for the Department’s implementation of national law enforcement programmes such as NLEDS. The 45 UK police forces are independent of central government, which means that the Department does not generally direct the police to accept a particular ICT system or way of working. However, and as stated above, one of the causes of the Department’s failure to deliver the NLEDS programme to the originally expected timetable was that the Department and the police did not have a consistent shared understanding of the intended outcomes. The Department and the police only documented the ‘vision’ for the programme in September 2018, almost two years into its development.25
14Despite the Department’s attempt to reset the programme in 2019, the police continued to have...
Concluded (the committee's words)
Despite the Department’s attempt to reset the programme in 2019, the police continued to have concerns about progress. In September 2020, the programme’s Chief Constables’ Reference Group stated that a failure to deliver against a proposed second reset would result in a formal withdrawal of consent for NLEDS from the police. This message was reinforced in October 2020 when the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) wrote to the Department’s Permanent Secretary stating that the police had lost confidence in the Home Office’s ability to deliver a range of law enforcement technology programmes, including NLEDS.26
15The former SRO acknowledged that the Department had not achieved the sense of partnership with...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The former SRO acknowledged that the Department had not achieved the sense of partnership with the police that it would have liked and that, following the first reset and finding things were even worse than previously realised, it was understandable that the police had lost confidence.27 He acknowledged that the Department had not got its relationship with the police into the right place. For example, there had never been a position where the Department and the police could together make decisions about trade-offs between programmes, and instead that “we sort of had to make those decisions ourselves in the Home Office, which is not what we would like to do”.28
16The Department told us that the approach it is now taking is “to have the...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department told us that the approach it is now taking is “to have the police on the inside”, with policing involved in all the decision-making at every single level.29 The Department said that previously in the programme, police had been part of the wider governance regime, but not part of the leadership team. It commented that previously 23 Q 13 24 Q 18 25 C&AG’s Report, paras 17, 2.1–2.2 26 C&AG’s Report, para 1.14 27 Q 13 28 Q 14 29 Q 17 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 13 the relationship between the Department and the policing felt like a ‘customer-supplier’ relationship, but the new engagement model was much more of a partnership approach, with police representatives clearly there to co-deliver.30 The Department told us that its new engagement model is co-authored, agreed jointly with the police, and that the NLEDS programme was a pathfinder programme for this new way of working together.31
17We asked about the inherent difficulty of reconciling the need to maintain the autonomy of...
Concluded (the committee's words)
We asked about the inherent difficulty of reconciling the need to maintain the autonomy of individual police forces with the need to implement co-ordinated and consistent IT transformation across all of the forces. The Department said it accepted that the task was complicated and difficult, but not impossible. It said that its new engagement model and spirit of partnership were “designed to make that complicated task as easy as it can practicably be.”32 The Department also told us that the National Police Chiefs’ Council had raised a number of qualifications about the new engagement model, which it was taking very seriously and working through diligently to make sure that the new model worked effectively.33
18On funding, the Department confirmed that it might give forces funds to ‘come on board’...
Concluded (the committee's words)
On funding, the Department confirmed that it might give forces funds to ‘come on board’ and test things early, and that it had put aside a £30 million contingency, specifically to work with individual forces on their adoption of the new law enforcement data system.34 On ensuring that police have the funding in future for NLEDS, the Department said it would keep working with forces to ensure they could make the choices each of them needed to make, and that this was part of the spending review.35 30 Qq 31–33 31 Q 17 32 Q 56 33 Q 57 34 Qq 23–24, 41 35 Q 88 14 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 2 Future resilience Continued reliance on the Police National Computer
19The Department’s failure to deliver NLEDS to date means that the increasingly fragile PNC system...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department’s failure to deliver NLEDS to date means that the increasingly fragile PNC system has not been replaced, bringing greater risks for police operations and requiring the police to bear more cost. In this report we have already mentioned that key staff on the PNC team are approaching retirement, and the specialists skills and knowledge required to maintain the PNC make it difficult for the Department to recruit and train replacements.36
20The PNC has consistently met its service availability targets in recent years; from January 2020...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The PNC has consistently met its service availability targets in recent years; from January 2020 to March 2021 the PNC’s availability was 99.74%, exceeding the Department’s target of 99.65%. However, in January 2021, the PNC experienced a data loss affecting 112,697 person records. The Department’s efforts to recover the data lost were made more difficult by the ageing technology on which the PNC is based.37
21Concerning the January 2021 incident, the Department told us that all deleted data had now...
Concluded (the committee's words)
Concerning the January 2021 incident, the Department told us that all deleted data had now been recovered and everything that had gone wrong in January had been put right.38 The Department said that the data had been recovered by the end of May, and that until then there had been ways for police to access what they needed, just not through the PNC.39 It told us that the incident happened because of human error, not because the PNC is old.40 The Department had accepted all of the 21 recommendations made by Lord Hogan-Howe after his independent review of the data loss.41
22The Department also confirmed that there had been an outage earlier this year, which was...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department also confirmed that there had been an outage earlier this year, which was due to a problem with network availability and the ‘wider PNC ecosystem’ in its Hendon data centre, affecting the ability of the police to access the PNC.42 It said it was investing significantly in this ecosystem to make sure the issue with not being able to access the PNC was unlikely to happen again.43 The Department’s former CDDTO (who is now Executive Director of the Government’s Central Digital and Data Office) stressed that the PNC had consistently met its service levels, but acknowledged also that outage at some point is “an inevitability in a legacy system.”44 While ideally all infrastructure and software would be kept at a supported level, she said that the challenge with the PNC was that it was so old that some components would go out of support in the next five years. The former CDDTO acknowledged that there have been cases where government has been over-optimistic about when new technologies would come on stream, and had therefore neglected to invest in legacy systems and created a backlog of problems. But she said that had not happened with the PNC, which had been maintained and supported throughout its life.45 36 C&AG’s Report, paras 15, 3.7 37 C&AG’s Report, para 15 38 Q 2 39 Qq 92, 93 40 Q 7 41 Q 2 42 Q 6 43 Q 8 44 Q 10 45 Q 11 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 15
23As the NAO reported, the PNC’s current technology will no longer be fully supported beyond...
Concluded (the committee's words)
As the NAO reported, the PNC’s current technology will no longer be fully supported beyond 2024. The Department told the NAO that it had decided to accept the risk of running the PNC without support for the database after 2024.46 In our evidence session the Department claimed that there would only be one small element of the system that will be unsupported beyond 2024, which was also the most stable element with no incidents against it for the last four years. The Department said it was investing significantly to ensure it could provide internal support mechanisms for that element. The former CDDTO confirmed that while the element would be unsupported by the vendor, the Department would provide that support in its stead. The Department said it was confident it would have the necessary expertise itself to deal with anything that came up.47 Replacing the Police National Database
24The PND enables police forces to share intelligence that they have gathered locally.
Concluded (the committee's words)
The PND enables police forces to share intelligence that they have gathered locally. It was created in 2011 following the 2004 Bichard Inquiry prompted by the murder of two girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, which criticised police information-sharing. The PND holds information about people, objects, locations and events, and enables analyses of these data. It contains over 4 billion pieces of information including records of organised crime, safeguarding issues and domestic abuse. In 2014 the Department recognised that the PND, while newer than the PNC, was also reaching the end of its useful life and needed updating.48
25The Department intended that the NLEDS programme would combine the PNC with the PND, which...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department intended that the NLEDS programme would combine the PNC with the PND, which was over-optimistic given the time originally available, but has now decided that the NLEDS programme will focus on replacing the PNC alone. In December 2020, the Department removed the PND from the scope of the NLEDS programme and it will now be maintained as a standalone system until 2031.49 There had been various changes in plans for what priority to give the PND in the programme, or indeed whether to make it an optional element, before the decision to remove the PND from the scope of NLEDS entirely.50
26Police and other users will therefore be unable to access PNC and PND data from...
Concluded (the committee's words)
Police and other users will therefore be unable to access PNC and PND data from a single system, which was one of the Department’s original objectives for NLEDS, for the foreseeable future. The previous intention to integrate the PND and the PNC led to the Department repeatedly deferring upgrades to and investment in the PND, affecting both service quality and stability. The Department estimates that a refresh of the most critical elements of the PND will cost at least £13 million between 2021 and 2025.51
27The Department’s former CDDTO commented that the Department had added complexity to the NLEDS programme...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department’s former CDDTO commented that the Department had added complexity to the NLEDS programme by trying to bring together the PNC and the PND into a single service. It had not understood the complexity of bringing that data together. In 2018, prior to the first reset and when she had still been in the Department, she and the former SRO had looked at the option of just focusing on the PNC, but at the time had 46 C&AG’s Report, para 16 47 Qq 27, 28 48 C&AG’s Report, paras 1.5, 1.6 49 C&AG’s Report, para 7 50 C&AG’s Report, para 2.21, Figure 5 51 C&AG’s Report, paras 2.24, 3.10, 3.11 16 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme not managed to get police forces on board with that approach.52 She commented that separating the PND and the PNC had significantly reduced the complexity of what the Department had to do and given it a much clearer development path.53
28The Department told us that there would be a separate five-year programme for the PND,...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department told us that there would be a separate five-year programme for the PND, starting from April 2022.54 The Department said it had been working with the NPCC lead for the PND over the last nine months on a “discovery phase”, developing a strategy of which the key element was currently the refresh of software and hardware. Then there would be the “near-term capability uplifts”. Then they would turn to “realising the original vision of actually having that federated search capability across the PNC, PND and then wider datasets across law enforcement into the future as well.” The Department said it would be doing things very differently to what was envisaged before, to join up PND and PNC systems. Rather than putting the two systems within the same ‘monolithic structure’, it would achieve the same goals in a “different, much easier and less complex way”, which is that “federated search capability”.55 The Department’s delivery of major programmes
29The Department is delivering several other national ICT programmes for police use, in addition to...
Recommended (the committee's words)
The Department is delivering several other national ICT programmes for police use, in addition to NLEDS, and needs to work closely with the police on all of them. The portfolio of programmes includes the Emergency Services Network, Home Office Biometrics and the National Automatic Number Plate Recognition Service. In 2020–21, these programmes cost £656 million.56 Departments across Whitehall face huge challenges to update or replace legacy systems, and must try to get the balance right between investment in continuing to upgrade legacy systems and knowing when to replace old systems with something that is more modern and fit for the future.57
30The NLEDS programme team is also changing the way it delivers technology to be more...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The NLEDS programme team is also changing the way it delivers technology to be more iterative. The November 2020 external programme review recommended an ‘agile’ approach in which technology is released gradually and changed in response to feedback. The Department’s view is that such an approach should help the programme develop technology to meet the needs of police forces.58 The Department stressed to us how much it wanted to be attuned to the police’s needs so that forces can do the best possible job on behalf of the public. It does not know the way that technology will change in five or ten years’ time, but needs to ensure that every solution and system can adapt for the future.59 The Department said it wanted to ensure that “whatever programmes we embark on, and whatever solutions we end up buying or building, we bake in the agility and flexibility to respond to future events, whether they are changes in the technological environment, changes in the relationship with policing, or any other requirements that come along.”60 52 Qq 14, 15 53 Q 18 54 Qq 69–70 55 Q 71 56 C&AG’s Report, para 1.11 57 Qq 9, 11 58 C&AG’s Report, para 3.19 59 Q 17 60 Q 79 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme 17 The former SRO for the NLEDS programme acknowledged that while there had been an appetite for ambitious new ways of doing things, such as agile working, the NLEDS team really did not have any experience in those things.61
31The Department told us that its new way of working with the police for the...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department told us that its new way of working with the police for the NLEDS programme would be a pathfinder programme for this new way of working. It would learn lessons and then roll this approach out to the other national programmes in its portfolio.62 The Department said it was already learning from the Emergency Services Network Programme about ways of working and applying it to NLEDS. It added that it had recently done a review of all the major police IT programmes that the Department is delivering, in order to get at underlying issues that affect not just one particular programme.63
32The Department also said it was now trying to really think about its portfolio of...
Concluded (the committee's words)
The Department also said it was now trying to really think about its portfolio of programmes as a whole and that a lot of the issues concerning NLEDS are relevant elsewhere; not just the way of working with the police, but also issues to do with capability, governance, leadership and skills.64 It said that, with the benefit of hindsight, it was aware that it needs to constantly consider its total level of ambition – that sometimes it would have to descope or in fact say “No, we are not able to do this particular shiny thing right now. We are going to have to wait until we have freed up some resource from other things.”65 61 Q 74 62 Q 17 63 Q 34 64 Q 75 65 Q 76 18 The National Law Enforcement Data Programme
Evidence
Oral evidence sessions 1
- 16 Sep 2021National Law Enforcement Data Programme4 witnesses, listed belowparliament.uk ↗
Who gave evidence 4 witnesses
- Joanna Davinsoninterim Government Chief Digital Officer, Cabinet Office
- Matthew Rycroft CBEPermanent Secretary, Home Office
- Mike HillDirector Police and Public Protection Technology and SRO of NLEDP, Home Office
- Stephen WebbFormer Senior Responsible Owner, Home Office