Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Twenty-Ninth Report - The National Law Enforcement Data Programme
Public Accounts Committee
HC 638
Published 8 December 2021
Recommendations
4
The police must continue to rely on the PNC for another five years, despite the...
Recommendation
The police must continue to rely on the PNC for another five years, despite the risks to its availability. The PNC is the most important law enforcement technology system in the UK, and it is vital that it is constantly …
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HM Treasury
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Conclusions (32)
2
Conclusion
The Department made poor decisions at the outset of the NLEDS programme and, despite signs it was going badly, was slow to make the necessary changes to correct this. The original scope and ambition for the NLEDS programme was unrealistic. The Department created a programme designed to replace two vital …
3
Conclusion
Working effectively with the police is critical to the delivery of NLEDS and other technology programmes, but it is not yet clear that the Department’s new approach will resolve longstanding challenges in delivering national programmes for local forces. We recognise that the challenge of managing relationships with 45 operationally independent …
5
Conclusion
The Department does not yet have a plan for maintaining the PND and combining its data with NLEDS in future. The Department has changed its plans for integrating the PND with the NLEDS programme several times, and it has now been excluded. The PND, introduced in 2011, is nearing the …
6
Conclusion
There is a risk that the Department still lacks the capacity to prioritise and deliver major digital programmes on time. In common with many other government departments and agencies, the Department is reliant on a range of legacy technology systems that need updating or replacing. We have seen several major …
1
Conclusion
On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office (the Department) and from the Department’s Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the National Law Enforcement Data Service (NLEDS) programme. We also took evidence from the Department’s previous …
7
Conclusion
The Department told us about its new engagement model, with more iterative delivery intended to enable quicker release cycles, so that capability gets into the hands of police forces more quickly.9 Where previously the Department had been looking at release cycles of around 12 months, it said it was aiming …
8
Conclusion
The Department told us that it has also retained what it called a ‘no-go option’ for the programme, whereby it could still decide to transfer the PNC on to a different platform, but without getting the same benefits of transformation, such as being cloud-based. It The National Law Enforcement Data …
9
Conclusion
One of the critical success factors for the programme is having the right people in place to deliver it. The programme depends on access to the PNC team but that team lacks capacity to support other programmes as well as manage the PNC, and this issue has caused delays.17 Key …
10
Conclusion
There were numerous reasons for the Department’s failure to deliver the NLEDS programme to the originally expected timetable. These included: • The Department and the police did not have a consistent shared understanding of the programme, with the focus of the programme changing several times; • The Department did not …
11
Conclusion
By early 2018, the Department had recognised that the programme would not deliver as originally planned. It had underestimated the amount of work required and the effort remaining was unaffordable within the allocated budget. In June 2018, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) reviewed NLEDS and concluded that delivery of …
12
Conclusion
The former SRO for the NLEDS programme acknowledged that the Department should have come earlier to the stage where it stepped back, stopped work and considered more fundamental choices about how to proceed. He described how the Department had under-estimated the complexity it expected to find within the old PNC …
40
Conclusion
The lack of documentation for the PNC meant that the Department repeatedly came across such surprises.23 The Department’s former CDDTO added that “our real error was that we underestimated the complexity.”24 Working with the police forces
13
Conclusion
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 …
14
Conclusion
Despite the Department’s attempt to reset the programme in 2019, the police continued to have concerns about progress. In September 2020, the programme’s Chief Constables’ Reference Group stated that a failure to deliver against a proposed second reset would result in a formal withdrawal of consent for NLEDS from the …
15
Conclusion
The former SRO acknowledged that the Department had not achieved the sense of partnership with the police that it would have liked and that, following the first reset and finding things were even worse than previously realised, it was understandable that the police had lost confidence.27 He acknowledged that the …
16
Conclusion
The Department told us that the approach it is now taking is “to have the police on the inside”, with policing involved in all the decision-making at every single level.29 The Department said that previously in the programme, police had been part of the wider governance regime, but not part …
17
Conclusion
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 …
18
Conclusion
On funding, the Department confirmed that it might give forces funds to ‘come on board’ and test things early, and that it had put aside a £30 million contingency, specifically to work with individual forces on their adoption of the new law enforcement data system.34 On ensuring that police have …
19
Conclusion
The Department’s failure to deliver NLEDS to date means that the increasingly fragile PNC system has not been replaced, bringing greater risks for police operations and requiring the police to bear more cost. In this report we have already mentioned that key staff on the PNC team are approaching retirement, …
20
Conclusion
The PNC has consistently met its service availability targets in recent years; from January 2020 to March 2021 the PNC’s availability was 99.74%, exceeding the Department’s target of 99.65%. However, in January 2021, the PNC experienced a data loss affecting 112,697 person records. The Department’s efforts to recover the data …
21
Conclusion
Concerning the January 2021 incident, the Department told us that all deleted data had now been recovered and everything that had gone wrong in January had been put right.38 The Department said that the data had been recovered by the end of May, and that until then there had been …
22
Conclusion
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 …
23
Conclusion
As the NAO reported, the PNC’s current technology will no longer be fully supported beyond 2024. The Department told the NAO that it had decided to accept the risk of running the PNC without support for the database after 2024.46 In our evidence session the Department claimed that there would …
24
Conclusion
The PND enables police forces to share intelligence that they have gathered locally. It was created in 2011 following the 2004 Bichard Inquiry prompted by the murder of two girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, which criticised police information-sharing. The PND holds information about people, objects, locations and events, and enables analyses …
25
Conclusion
The Department intended that the NLEDS programme would combine the PNC with the PND, which was over-optimistic given the time originally available, but has now decided that the NLEDS programme will focus on replacing the PNC alone. In December 2020, the Department removed the PND from the scope of the …
26
Conclusion
Police and other users will therefore be unable to access PNC and PND data from a single system, which was one of the Department’s original objectives for NLEDS, for the foreseeable future. The previous intention to integrate the PND and the PNC led to the Department repeatedly deferring upgrades to …
27
Conclusion
The Department’s former CDDTO commented that the Department had added complexity to the NLEDS programme by trying to bring together the PNC and the PND into a single service. It had not understood the complexity of bringing that data together. In 2018, prior to the first reset and when she …
28
Conclusion
The Department told us that there would be a separate five-year programme for the PND, starting from April 2022.54 The Department said it had been working with the NPCC lead for the PND over the last nine months on a “discovery phase”, developing a strategy of which the key element …
29
Conclusion
The Department is delivering several other national ICT programmes for police use, in addition to NLEDS, and needs to work closely with the police on all of them. The portfolio of programmes includes the Emergency Services Network, Home Office Biometrics and the National Automatic Number Plate Recognition Service. In 2020–21, …
30
Conclusion
The NLEDS programme team is also changing the way it delivers technology to be more iterative. The November 2020 external programme review recommended an ‘agile’ approach in which technology is released gradually and changed in response to feedback. The Department’s view is that such an approach should help the programme …
31
Conclusion
The Department told us that its new way of working with the police for the NLEDS programme would be a pathfinder programme for this new way of working. It would learn lessons and then roll this approach out to the other national programmes in its portfolio.62 The Department said it …
32
Conclusion
The Department also said it was now trying to really think about its portfolio of programmes as a whole and that a lot of the issues concerning NLEDS are relevant elsewhere; not just the way of working with the police, but also issues to do with capability, governance, leadership and …