Plod IT spending fails to fall down the stairs as taxpayers cough £385m

Spend on IT by coppers has barely fallen in three years, despite huge public sector spending cuts - freedom of information responses sent to El Reg can reveal. According to responses sent from 12 police forces - there are 43 across England and Wales - total spend for 2014/15 was £385m, down from £396m in 2013/14 and £391m in …

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's about time a few of these forces were amalgamated to save cash, in Scotland there is only one force - Police Scotland. This will not happen of course as a lot of the phoney baloney politico police and crime commissioners (and upper police management) will be collecting their p45s.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scotland is tiny

I think people tend to forget how tiny, in terms of population, Scotland actually is: 5.3M.

That's significantly less than the population of London alone, 8.6M, and and just under 10% of England's population of 53M!

[wyatt]

There is Police Scotland, however the individual forces are still spending their money on their individual needs especially in the IT/Telecom procurement area!

[Chris Miller]

The [Metropolitan Police] force plans to outsource IT services to cut costs.

Because that's always worked so well in the past. </sarcasm>

[Yugguy]

Yep. It pisses off the staff and it pisses off the users.

But it pleases the accountants.

[Chris Miller]

And it only pleases the accountants for a few years until the time comes for renegotiation and they find that the outsourcers have you over a barrel.

[hplasm]

"The body has taken four-years to get off the ground"

Did it leave behind a white outline ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've an idea...

...get rid of all that data you are illegally holding on people. That should free up a huge amount of IT resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

how about a central police portal that all forces push and pull all crime info (any thing needed to send a crim down). All the forces could then use their secure connections (lets call it a criminal justice extranet) to connect to it and even permit hardened mobile device connections over the public internet.

maybe call it Police Intranet Group Storage in the Cloud

maybe pCloud for short.

All forces would store data in the same formats and perhaps cops from one part of the country would work the same way as in other parts of the country. Perhaps cops in the north could help out on cases in the south without leaving their patch?

Cops could even work at home snuggled in their blankets :)

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't like sharing data with each other, it'll never happen.

The politics and handbags that occur around Police collaboration is quite remarkable.