Police National Computer: Security
(asked on 1st May 2024) - View Source
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of security measures in place for the Police National Computer.
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.