Recommendation 17

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