Recommendation 13

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