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Written question asked by Siobhain McDonagh (Labour) on Wednesday, 1 May 2024, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 7 May 2024. It was answered by Chris Philp (Conservative) on Monday, 13 May 2024 on behalf of the Home Office.

Police National Computer

Question

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many back-up servers are in operation for the Police National Computer.

Answer

Number of outages affecting the PNC, breakdown below. Partial PNC outages are included in the breakdown. Therefore, elements of the PNC service may have been available during the outage period.

Outages on the same day have been counted as separate instances.

Year

Number of outages - Planned

Number of outages - Unplanned

2015

22

48

2016

10

18

2017

9

17

2018

13

12

2019

4

1

2020

7

12

2021

11

18

2022

14

13

2023

17

18

*2024

4

6

Total

111

163

* Outages for 2024 are reported up to 31st March 2024.

Regular Security IT Health Checks/Audits are undertaken on PNC with actions to manage, mitigate or resolve vulnerabilities progressed to enhance the security of the system. The PNC is security assured by the Police Digital Service on behalf of Policing and in line with HO policy.

PNC has a number of back up servers for resilience and mirroring to provide a Disaster Recovery capability from a secondary site. There are numerous back up servers at the primary site and also at the DR site providing several layers of back up for the operation of the PNC

****NOTE - providing detail on the numbers of actual servers increases the operational risk to PNC.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
24360
Session
2023-24
Grouped for answer
Yes
Subjects
Police national computer
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.parliament.uk