Recommendation 22

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