Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 5
63rd Report - Increasing police productivity
Published 28 Jan 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Increasing police productivity All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
It is taking too long to identify and scale-up innovative practices and roll-out new technologies to improve police productivity. There are many examples of police forces exploiting innovative technologies—including audio-visual multimedia redaction, live facial recognition and enhanced video response—but scaling these across all 43 police forces has been slow. The Home Office is implementing some of the changes from the 2023 Policing Productivity Review but has reduced funding to support the roll-out of new technologies from £105 million in 2024–25 to £50 million in 2025–26. As around 80% of police funding is committed to staff pay costs, police forces have limited flexibility to invest in new technologies and have been forced to increase their borrowing to fund their capital programmes. The College of Policing acknowledged that the large number of bodies involved in the roll-out of innovative practices, including identifying and scaling innovations with the greatest potential, was not the most effective way of operating. There is also scope to improve police productivity by streamlining processes. The College of Policing has developed a diagnostic tool to help police forces identify opportunities, in areas such as burglary, but its launch has been delayed. 4 recommendation The Home Office should provide the Committee with an update in six months on the steps it has taken to speed up the adoption of new technologies and support police forces to improve their productivity. This should include setting out: a. the digital technologies with the greatest potential and how it is supporting their wider adoption; b. how it will support the College of Policing to identify innovations with the greatest potential; c. how it will simplify the arrangements for approving and rolling-out new technologies; and d. the results of using the new diagnostic tool to assess the scope for productivity improvements from streamlining police processes, including the potential benefits identi
From: Public Accounts Committee, 63rd Report - Increasing police productivity (HC 1239), 28 January 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 7 April 2026 (deadline 28 March 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on every recommendation, marking some as implemented and setting target dates for others.
- On performance data, the Home Office will write to the Committee by July 2026 setting out the key metrics it will incorporate in future iterations of the Police Performance Framework, and its plans for public reporting of performance data.
- On officer numbers, the officer maintenance grant and the requirement to achieve officer headcount targets "has been abolished from 1 April 2026". The government adds that prioritising neighbourhood policing "may place some limitations on workforce flexibility" which the Home Office "will keep under review".
- On efficiency savings, the Police Efficiency and Collaboration Programme has "an annual cashable efficiencies target of £354 million by 2028-29". Mandating approaches to policing "will be considered where there is a case to do so".
- On police IT systems, the government gives a target implementation date of December 2029. It says the National Police Service, once established, "will consider these recommendations further then", and that force-level IT updates "must align" with the implementation of force mergers.