By Mark Ballard for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Doubt also remains about the final deadline of the Police
National Database (PND), the final aim of the Bichard reforms,
dubbed collectively as Impact, which had already slipped three
years to 2010.
A spokeswoman for the National Police Improvement Agency, which
replaced the Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito) over
the weekend, confirmed that problems with existing police databases
unearthed post-Bichard meant the Cross Region Information Sharing
Project (Crisp), one of the key Police responses to Bichard, had
become unfeasible. The Home Secretary is currently considering a
final decision on the project, which aims to improve data sharing
between police forces.
One of the spanners in the works is the poor quality of existing
police data, she said. Police quality procedures for inputting,
maintaining, and sharing data will not become compulsory until
2010, a year later than planned, and these will be essential for a
centralised police database to be workable.
Meanwhile, the Impact Nominal Index, a hash of existing police
databases that merely tells officers if data on a subject is
available on another force's database, is being rolled out around
Britain and will be installed in all forces by 2009. This, together
with the data problems, make Crisp an unnecessary waste of
money.
"It's a matter of if we focus on the interim or do we focus on
the PND," said the spokeswoman, adding that it was being reviewed
to consider if the plans represented the "best value for
money".
She insisted the work to date had not been in vain, saying the
Crisp database was always intended to be subsumed into the PND
eventually.
It had been in planning even before Bichard's 2004 report.
According to one industry source, problems were apparent last
summer when the already delayed Crisp pilots were supposed to
run.
"We took police data from one force and found 300 records
associated with the one person, and not necessarily linked as the
same person," he said.
Part of the problem had also been politics between forces, who
each tended to expect the other to change its data procedures and
structures. The decision to "review" Crisp was made at least as
long ago as last May. A revised schedule for roll-out was pencilled
in for December 2007. But the Impact team was so unsure about what
they were doing last year that suppliers were being given "a
different story every time we spoke to them", said the source.
This crunching of Crisp might also become a problem for the PND
in meeting its revised 2010 deadline. A winding-up press statement
issued on Friday by Pito stated how the existing Police National
Computer had been patched up - an operation previously detailed as
replacement of the old Siemens computers on which it was
running.
The announcement stated: "The re-platforming project was
completed in February 2007 and safeguards PNC services until at
least 2014, when a successor system, known as the Police National
Database (PND), is due to be available."
The press office of the National Police Improvement Agency
subsequently said the statement had been misleading, and insisted
it was still on track for 2010.
The spokeswoman said the suppliers had been consulted in
workshops and would be invited to tender to create the PND in
"early summer". Implementation was scheduled to begin this
month.
© The Register
2007
