Recommendation 5

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