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Bichard Inquiry

I congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley) on initiating this debate, which certainly is timely. I also congratulate him on maintaining the pressure and ensuring that the Government are held to account for taking forward the recommendations of the Bichard inquiry. I share the concern of the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) about the delays, and I associate myself with his remarks about what initiated the Bichard inquiry in the first place. The appalling murders in Soham moved the entire nation. The consequence was that fundamental failings in the ability of our police forces to share information were exposed. It is worth reminding ourselves that when Bichard reported in June 2004, he said that it was a matter of urgency that greater intelligence sharing and a national IT system should be introduced. Two and a half years later, as the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central said, there are still substantial delays, and 2010 is the earliest date for full implementation. As The Guardian reported in June 2006, the cost estimates have doubled over the past year, with some estimates taking us into the region of £2 billion. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us a little more about where we are with the programme, as well as what the latest cost estimates and the timetable are. In particular, I should like to know how the National Policing Improvement Agency budget affects those issues and whether it has yet been settled. The agency will be charged with driving the programme forward, and the resources available to it will plainly have a great effect on the Government’s ability to carry out the Bichard recommendations. Rather than rehearsing many of the points that hon. Members have very effectively made, I want to introduce some new considerations for debate, because the Bichard inquiry and the subsequent failure to take forward its recommendations have demonstrated that there are some real issues here, but the House has not debated them sufficiently. The first issue is the security of the data, should it finally become available to all police forces. After all, the data not only relate to convictions, but include other data held by police forces and may also come from intelligence systems. Police databases may include entirely unsubstantiated information, leads, suspicions or details of people who are of interest to the police, as well as information provided by the security services. Data will therefore be of tremendously varying quality, and much of it will identify individuals who do not necessarily have a criminal record or feature on any of the other databases held by the police or other agencies, such as the DNA database or the fingerprint database. That raises questions about the ability of other forces to share such data and the security protocols that are being put in place to ensure that data are properly used. Plainly, a national database could be a powerful tool in the fight against crime, and we all accept Bichard’s conclusion that the failure to share intelligence contributed to the awful events in Soham. Although we understand the need for a national database, however, I am not sure that we properly understand the extent to which it will change the way in which the police operate. There has been only a belated debate about the national health service database of patient records, with people starting to question the use and availability of those records throughout the country only once things were under way. It is therefore important that we debate the issue before us now, so that the protocols that will need to be put in place are properly discussed. The second issue that arises as a consequence of the recommendations is whether there is sufficient national impetus to drive such police IT projects. Frankly, I am reaching the conclusion that there is not. There are obviously strong arguments for joining up the information communication technology systems used by different police forces, but that has been extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Part of the reason for that is that the 43 forces have historically procured their own IT systems and been geographically isolated—they have had their own fiefdoms in some cases—which means that their systems are not always compatible. I am not convinced that there is much momentum behind reform of the police IT market, and the shared services agenda, which is taking off in other parts of the public sector, certainly does not seem to be taking off in anything like the same way among the police. In its document ““Transforming Criminal Justice””, the CBI notes that, to date, police engagement with providers has been fragmented, and that is particularly true of the IT market, where a number of niche players have dominated. For example, approximately 26 out of 37 forces in England have different crime and control systems, and similar fragmentation is found in the core human resources and crime systems. Previous national projects have failed to take off, including HOLMES2, which was designed to be used by the police service to run major crime inquiries and casualty bureaux after major incidents. Only three forces have the electronic document management system necessary to interface with HOLMES2, and even the second-largest police force—West Midlands—is unable to afford a management system link to it. That is despite the fact that the database has been operational since 1989. That chronic lack of co-ordination was exposed by Bichard, who described it as ““an unhappy position””, and that led to the proposals for IMPACT. However, IMPACT is a hugely ambitious programme, given that the police IT market is highly fragmented and dominated by a number of niche players. As I said, 26 out of 37 forces have different crime and control systems. There are also more than 15 different HR systems in England and Wales and more than 10 different providers of crime systems, and several forces run their systems in-house. The information systems strategy for the police service—an Association of Chief Police Officers programme that attempts to set out a common architecture for police ICT services—will enable individual forces to procure systems that would be able to talk to each other. Significantly, however, that programme is not mandated. IMPACT will therefore have to operate in a fragmented environment. I can, of course, see the sense of IMPACT, which will warehouse forces’ custody, case, call management, contact, intelligence and crime data. It will also include the national databases, including convictions and the sex offenders’ register, and make them available to all forces. However, it will eventually bring together 100 million pieces of data. As the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central said, the sheer scale and ambition of the project is one of the contributing factors to the delay that has taken place. As the hon. Gentleman said, there is a noticeable difference between the approaches that have been taken in England and Wales and in Scotland. The Scottish intelligence database has enabled the sharing of information between all eight police forces there, which have access to 90 per cent. of the intelligence that is gathered. Interestingly, that has brought about a cultural change in Scotland, with police officers using intelligence more proactively. Before the intelligence database was implemented, a relatively small percentage of Scotland’s police officers submitted intelligence, and there was no mechanism for feeding the results back to officers, which many considered a black hole. Even if officers’ intelligence did result in an arrest, they would rarely hear about it. Since the implementation of the database, however, more than 70 per cent. of police officers in Scotland have actively submitted and researched intelligence, and that figure is growing as officers see how their intelligence has helped other officers. That demonstrates not only that a national database plays a significant role in ensuring that we have the protections that we seek post-Soham, but that it is a crime-fighting tool, which will improve the way in which police officers work and their motivation. An effective system would therefore plainly have enormous advantages beyond simply the efficient management of data. What conclusion can we draw, then, from the failure to drive the national database forward? One is, I think, a standard conclusion about the way in which Governments tend to procure major projects of that kind. The hon. Member for Taunton and I attended a seminar recently examining those issues, including Government failures to procure. The central conclusion of that seminar was that it is uncertainty on the part of politicians who procure, and a lack of clear specification, that causes subsequent problems in the delivery of projects. However, there are also, plainly, resource implications that must be addressed if forces are to be held to the promises and undertakings given in the Government’s response to Bichard. A radical suggestion would be that police budgets, instead of allowing the individual procurement of IT systems, could be top-sliced. That would certainly ensure compatibility across all police forces and allow the exploitation of economies of scale. However, that would take us into a huge project, involving the unnecessary redundancy of perfectly good systems; and it would produce a one-size-fits-all ICT system that would stifle innovation and prevent forces from tailoring their systems to specific needs. If that is not a realistic possibility, the onus is on the Government to ensure that there is much more effective central strategic direction of the use of ICT in police forces. It is no longer acceptable that the different approaches that police forces have taken—the fiefdoms, the individual purchasing of systems and so on—should continue. In many respects there has been far too much Government interference in local policing. Attempts to direct policing and to set targets have interfered with officer discretion at all levels and distorted professional activity. In other ways, however, the Government have had insufficient drive to ensure that individual forces co-operate more effectively. We talked this morning about the lack of progress on the sharing of services and work force modernisation. In relation to ICT the story has been the same. We cannot go on holding debates year after year in this place at which we observe that the timetable for the implementation of a national intelligence database has continued to slip and that the costs have continued to rise. It is important to get a grip on the matter, tie down the specifications, deal with the security issues, understand the cost implications and make resources available, if it is going to happen. If it is not going to happen, alternative arrangements must be investigated, as the hon. Member for Barnsley, Central suggested. The project is too important for the fight against crime and the protection of the public for the situation to be allowed to slip any further.