Emergency Service Network Programme

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Plan B is part of plan A, which is also to provide the 292 4G mobile phone sites that the noble Lord mentioned in his question. We have picked this up. We have made a decision to terminate the previous contract; we had a court case to do that. We are now putting in place a revised contract—we have to exit the former contract—and resilience will be built in to make sure that this is the most important service that can be provided, because this is how police, fire and other emergency services communicate with each other in times of difficulty. It is an absolute priority for the Home Office to get this right, and I hope that we will do so in the course of the next few years.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I keep hearing that the Government want us to be leaders in AI, but it is very difficult to work out how this can be when the Government have not dealt with the fact that the police are being run as an analogue operation in a digital age. It almost beggars belief that all 43 police forces in the UK use different IT systems, the majority of which do not even speak to each other.

We have just heard about the 51 year-old police national computer; that is never going to be sorted in the next, goodness knows, five to 10 years, and it stores only very basic biometric data. Many of the drones the police are using are clapped out and need to be replaced. When are the Government going to wake up to the major problem the police have got with technology and actually provide the funds to deal with this once and for all?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes an extremely valid point. There are 44 police forces in total—43 plus the British Transport Police—and they have a range of different technological methods of gathering information and working. Obviously, from a taxpayer efficiency and a security point of view, we want to make sure that we get the best deal. Part of the Government’s efficiency drive will be to look at how we can work with police forces, which are independent, to do that downstream. The change we have made from the previous Government’s position will save the taxpayer £200 million per year when up and running. That is a more efficient way of getting a better service for the taxpayer.