Police IT: 'Lots of money is being wasted'

Police forces in England and Wales are wasting money by failing to collaborate when buying new IT, according to the director general of the CBI.

The CBI's Richard Lambert said that the separate nature of the 43 forces has acted as a barrier to productivity growth in areas including IT and shared services.

"Lots of money is being wasted by purchasing different software and different systems which may seem the best solution for the particular circumstances of an individual force, but miss the opportunities and cost savings that arise from developing process that are effective service wide," Lambert told the Police Foundation's John Harris Memorial Lecture last night.

This lack of joined up thinking was responsible for it taking almost a decade to rollout a compatible digital radio service, Airwave, across different forces he said.

"Business people understand through bitter experience about how incompatibilities between IT systems can create huge additional workloads," he added.

Lambert called on forces to implement unified systems and IT procurement practices themselves, saying that during the credit crunch realising savings has become more important than ever.

"[It's] far better that such an increased focus [on joint procurement] should come from the police forces themselves, rather than be imposed on them from on high. One obvious course of action would be to become much more systematic about identifying best practice and rolling it out across the system," he said.

Lambert also cited the findings of the Treasury's Operational Efficiency Programme, which revealed that savings of up to £7.2bn a year could be made by sharing back office services and IT across the public sector.