Whitehall lobs £40M at 'critical' phase of police DB reboot

Officials say there's no time to switch suppliers if they want the PNC off life support before March 2026

The Home Office is flinging nearly £40 million in taxpayer cash at PA Consulting to get the big-ticket successor to the Police National Computer (PNC) over the finish line.

The direct £37.5 million award will run from September 19, 2025, through August 31, 2026 – roughly 11 months – and covers "managed, engineering and support services" for the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) "Person Update" product, which is part of a larger project to replace the creaking PNC.

Officials argue that swapping suppliers at this stage would create "incompatible services and disproportionate technical difficulties," so they are using Schedule 5, Paragraph 7 of the Procurement Act 2023 to justify going straight to PA Consulting.

The PNC, designated critical national infrastructure, has been running for more than 50 years and remains the backbone of frontline policing. It holds data on about 13 million people, 62.6 million vehicles, and 58.5 million drivers. Its long-planned replacement, LEDS, is a £900 million, 12-year project scheduled to go fully live by March 2026. 

The Person Product – the database of individuals – is described as sitting on the "critical path" for the decommissioning of the PNC. Any delay risks keeping the legacy system on costly life support well past its planned retirement date.

Whitehall's own project tracker for 2025 still has LEDS down for an amber delivery rating, noting that while "delivery confidence has improved since 2021… this programme remains large, complex, and high risk."

"Whilst March 2026 remains achievable, ongoing planning and funding pressures continue to present material risks," the government report adds, noting that the total cost for the LEDS project is now likely to top £1 billion. "We are actively addressing these through targeted mitigation strategies, with regular oversight by the programme board."

In that light, the direct award looks less like a cosy deal and more like a frantic move to keep the timeline from slipping and to avoid a multimillion-pound bill for another PNC extension.

Even so, doubling down on PA Consulting makes the government even more reliant on a single supplier for one of the most complex IT projects in UK policing. With the Home Office still smarting from the e-borders fiasco and the troubled Emergency Services Network project, ministers will be keen to avoid LEDS becoming the next case study in how not to run a major IT project.

The PNC itself is no stranger to controversy. Over the years, the legacy system has been blamed for everything from missing or delayed criminal record checks to the notorious 2021 data wipe that accidentally deleted 400,000 arrest records – forcing a frantic recovery effort and prompting ministers to admit that a lack of reviews and effective testing contributed to the debacle.

LEDS is supposed to draw a line under that era, promising a modern platform that consolidates multiple databases, allows faster queries from the field, and makes sharing data with other agencies less painful. But with the PNC still powering daily policing and a hard March 2026 deadline looming, the pressure is on to make sure the replacement actually turns up on time – and doesn't simply become the next multi-year government IT saga. ®