The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) needs to stop buying the "shiny newest technology" in order to make IT savings in the next few years, an expert panel has claimed.
Last week, the London Assembly's Budget and Performance Committee revealed that it would investigate how the Met can improve its spending on technology, and today was the first of two public meetings focused on the Met's technology strategy.
The panel who were questioned by the Committee consisted of: Aileen Murphee from the National Audit Office (NAO); Dr Tom Jackson from Loughborough University; Bob Quick, a former assistant commissioner at the MPS; Terry Skinner from the Justice and Emergency Services Information Communication Association; and chief constable Simon Parr from the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Skinner argued that the police spends too much on IT because of a fundamental problem with the way it sets out its strategy.
"The industry believes the way police engage with the strategy is not right, they will buy the shiny newest technology. If police say ‘these are the outcomes we want to achieve, these are the business problems we will solve', they need to let industry advise them on what is the best way; there are many companies that can sell them million pounds worth of shiny toys but it does not mean they are the best for the job the police are trying to do," he said.
"Other parts of the public sector have started to get it right but the police haven't. Private sector does this right and sometimes it involves the shiny toys and excessive spend but they will look at the whole end-to-end solution and get paid on the outcomes not just the timescale involved," he added.
The Met's current spend on IT is £325m and it wants to cut ICT spending by £42m in 2014-15 and £60m in 2015-16. The Committee questioned whether the figures were feasible.
"I think it is a well-known rule of thumb that when you take procurement that you haven't looked at in a long time it is easy to save 10 per cent straight away, so I wouldn't say £42m in savings out of a total of £325m spend is unrealistic," the NAO's Murphee responded.
But in order to cut costs and yield benefits from technology, former MPS assistant commissioner Quick claimed that the Met has to solve certain issues.
"There are three fundamental points the police need to solve: they have to know what they should know; a lot of the systems are not connected, and therefore dots are not joined up meaning that knowledge in the system is just missed. It is a very common event and there was a recent case which exemplified this [possibly referring to the Independent's story of Nicola Edgington being jailed for 37 years]," he said.
"Secondly, police need to be able to see their predicted, emerging and current demands, at the moment they see bits of it but they have not seen an overview, and finally they need to know their available resources and in terms of their qualifications what they can do and what they are skilled enough to do each day and each week," he added.
Chief constable Simon Parr summed this up by stating that the force "often has technology strategies and not information strategies, and that is the wrong way around".
NAO's Murphee added that currently, the Met Police may well be giving out mobile technology to its officers; but that this does not mean it encompasses a wider information strategy.
"You need to say what you're going to do with it. The back office connection, user performance, implementation, you have to think through all of that beforehand," she said.
Loughborough University's Jackson said that it all comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
"Where are you going to save your money, where are the business improvements? There are lots of reports of mobile terminals being used but look at the full cost of this, not just the mobile devices but also knowing at the very end by implementing it, what other associated costs will come from it," he said.
Representatives from the MPS and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime will be questioned at a second meeting in June, following the publication of the Met's technology strategy in the spring.
