Keeping the lights on takes up nearly all police IT spending in England and Wales

Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up as treasury pulls plug, NAO finds

Police forces in England and Wales spend around 97 percent of their £2 billion ($2.6 billion) annual technology budget on maintaining legacy systems, an official report has found.

Fragmented and stop-start technology investment has resulted in the police being slow to adopt new technologies — and benefit from the expected productivity improvements — at a national level, according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

The UK's independent public spending watchdog said that in the financial year 2024-25, His Majesty's Treasury provided £234 million over four years to help fund investments in police technology, including £55.5 million in that year. "The Home Office used this to help support the rollout of technologies, including live facial recognition, the use of drones, automating public contact and AI," the report, Police productivity, said.

However, the Treasury cut the funding stream from the 2025-26 financial year, and the "Home Office has not allocated funding for some projects, such as live facial recognition, and reduced funding for other projects, including knife detection technology," the report said.

It pointed out that investment in new technology is hindered by the need to continue supporting existing systems.

"Police forces spend around £2 billion annually on technology, with 97 percent spent on maintaining legacy systems," the report said.

The NAO said it had previously found that across government, digital transformation was held back by inappropriate funding models, the estimated scope of early work, and a lack of skills or leadership.

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) brings UK police leaders together to set direction in policing and drive progress for the public. It found that "the absence of a single policing 'voice' leads to a lack of clarity in decision-making and insufficient prioritization of science and technology across policing," according to the NAO report.

"It also highlighted challenges for policing in recruiting and retaining a skilled digital workforce, the need to maintain legacy systems restricting the ability to invest in new technology, financial constraints leading to inconsistent digital transformation, poor data quality and insufficient support for change management," the report said.

The Home Office has also recognized that its approach to funding — which led to multiple funding streams for tech — made it more difficult for police forces to decide how to invest in new technology, "limiting longer-term planning and rollout."

A 'failing service'

Examples of the real-world impact of the government's approach to tech funding and strategy are not hard to come by.

Earlier this year, the police services crime intelligence database was rated a "Red" risk by the governments projects' watchdog as tech teams struggled to migrate from a legacy Oracle platform. The Police National Database (PND) was meant to shift to the cloud, but procurement for this move has been delayed by more than a year.

Elements of the current PND transformation program include transitioning to cloud-native architecture, enhancing system usability, and updating or replacing obsolete Oracle databases and middleware.

A transparency notice published by the government in 2024 said: "The PND transformation is being delivered to address the technological debt in PND which is causing a failing service." ®