Home Office Grants Another £26m For Police Cloud And Data Transformation

Matthew Broersma,
Police security crowd control © chrisdorney Shutterstock

The funding is to support a cloud data-access programme, DNA database, data analytics lab and other schemes

The Home Office has detailed awards of more than £26 million over the next three years to dozens of police transformation projects, including a data analytics lab and a cloud-based data access programme.

The awards are part of a police transformation fund set aside in the 2015 Spending Review to help prepare law enforcement for changing conditions, including the improved use of technology, and follow a first round of bidding early in the summer whose awards amounted to £23 million.

police handcuff security crime keyboard © Oleksiy Mark Shutterstock

Cloud data

Funding of more than £5.9 million over two years went to a national effort led by Dorset Police to create a joint forensics and biometrics programme, which is aimed at reducing the time it takes to provide DNA results needed for investigations.

An award of £2.3 million went to a series of bids developed by the Police ICT Company and Police Technology Council for the Police Reform Transformation Board for projects including cloud-based access to local, regional and national information and more effective ICT services.

Another award of £2 million is to go toward the development of a national policing data analytics lab intended to improve the way data is collated and used for protecting the public and preventing crime.

A £450,000 award went to the Metropolitan Police and the College of Policing, which is to work with forces across the UK to design digital recruitment technologies intended to help promote diversity in the police workforce.

‘Cutting-edge’ tech

“It is my pleasure to award funds to a raft of projects today, from cutting-edge approaches to reducing crime through to digital projects that will help promote diversity in policing,” said home secretary Amber Rudd in a statement.

The Home Office published the full list of successful bids on Gov.UK.

London’s Metropolitan Police force said last week it had selected Microsoft’s UK data centre as the depository for the video data recorded by officers’ body-worn cameras. The Evidence.com system is part of the world’s second-largest rollout of Body-Worn Video (BWV) systems for frontline police officers.

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