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28 Feb 2007 : Column 300WH—continued
The IMPACT programme was launched to provide an integrated approach to the improvement of police information management through business change, supported by the appropriate information technology. I emphasise the notion of business change—this is not just about getting the appropriate information technology. The baton will now pass to the new national policing improvement agency from April 2007 to ensure that it is police-led and that it delivers what the police need. My hon. Friend has raised the issue of the agency and the ownership of IMPACT. I reassure him that the NPIA will be a non-departmental public body and a police-led organisation, which will be its strength. That will ensure that it delivers what the police need. Ownership will be where it should be, with the police. The NPIA is committed to delivering
IMPACT and the business change that it represents, as well as the IT systems needed to support it.
An initial review of police information technology procurement was completed in 2004, and after careful consideration by Ministers it is now feeding through into the wider work to develop the NPIA on track. We are already working with the shadow agency and Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, who is heading it up. Its work is impressive, and we will see significant improvement as it gets up and running from April 2007.
Nick Herbert: While the Minister is on the subject of the NPIA, can she tell us whether its budget has yet been set? Is she satisfied that there will be sufficient provision in the budget to ensure that the IMPACT programme can be delivered to the original specified timetable?
Joan Ryan: It is no secret that there is pressure on Home Office budgets, but I am confident that the NPIA will be able to deliver its programme. As I have said, the next progress report on the issues that we are discussing will take place in the spring, and we expect an announcement within a few weeks about the detail and time scales for the development of IMPACT and other technological issues. Further information will be available shortly, but I am confident on that point. We remain committed to fulfilling all 31 of Bichard’s recommendations.
Nick Herbert: And the NPIA budget?
Joan Ryan: As I have said, I am confident that the NPIA will be able to fulfil the work programme that it is setting.
Nick Herbert: I am grateful to the Minister for her further explanation, but can I press her on the specific question whether the NPIA’s budgets have been agreed?
Joan Ryan: I shall have write to the hon. Gentleman about whether that agreement has formally been reached. I reiterate that I am confident that the NPIA will be able to carry out the work programme that it has set.
Points were raised about the quality of data and data exchange. Work to improve the quality of data on the police national computer has been ongoing. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, which has embedded the monitoring of forces’ timely input of data and the quality of their data into its baseline assessments, continues to work proactively with any forces that experience difficulty. The project to achieve the direct input of court results through the police national computer has been reinvigorated, but it remains challenging. The development of automatic resulting from the courts to the police is dependent on a number of factors, including streamlining the complex business process and having the right information technology in place. Nevertheless, the roll-out of the XHIBIT system to Crown courts was completed on 31 March 2006, which is enabling faster updating of court results to the PNC.
The initial roll-out of the Libra infrastructure to all magistrates courts was completed in 2003 and the further roll-out of the infrastructure is pending Department for Constitutional Affairs and Court Service evaluation of the outcomes of the experiences to date. That clearly concerned Sir Michael, and we had hoped that improvements would be achieved sooner. The new case management system is now running in 16 courts, with another seven courts planned for this quarter. We have seen improvements to the Criminal Records Bureau vetting procedures, which include developing and implementing a quality assurance framework in partnership with the police service to standardise the disclosure processes across all forces. The CRB has reported that the majority of forces have now implemented the quality assurance framework following delivery of training with the remainder to be completed by the end of the financial year.
In April 2005, the CRB also issued revised guidance to all registered bodies, further strengthening the disclosure application process. This is an appropriate point to reply to the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne), who has raised points about CRB checks on staff who were in place before 2002 or teaching staff who have not changed their place of employment since that time. Checks were introduced in 2002, and from then it was strongly recommended that new appointments to the school work force who will work closely with children should be CRB checked.
There has never been a requirement to CRB check school staff who were in the work force before 2002 and who have stayed in continuous employment since then, but such staff must all be checked against the Department’s list 99, which is the list of individuals who are barred from working with children in education settings. Checking against list 99 incorporates a check against the Protection of Children Act 1999 list of individuals who are barred from working with children in other settings.
Today, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills announced that the revised list 99 regulations have been extended so that a greater range of offences will result in automatic inclusion on the list. They will include those who have received cautions as well as those who have received convictions for sexual offences against children. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman and clarifies the requirement for CRB checking.
In April 2005 the CRB issued revised guidance to registered bodies further to strengthen the disclosure application process. Under the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, we have enabled the CRB to seek access to relevant information from a wider range of appropriate data sources for vetting purposes. Those sources include the Serious Organised Crime Agency and HM Revenue and Customs. That will further strengthen the vetting regime.
Most significantly, the establishment of a new integrated vetting and barring scheme for those working with children and vulnerable adults should be borne in mind. The scheme has passed to the Home Office following Royal Assent for the legislative framework. The Home Office is now working closely with the Department for Education and Skills and the CRB to establish the independent barring board, a new
body that will manage all discretionary judgements under the scheme. That is due to be implemented in September 2008.
We have made some significant progress, but the real challenge is that the changes must fit together with subsequent developments in a consistent and co-ordinated way. New business processes for information sharing must spread consistent good practice but manage and present information in a way that supports the needs of the new safeguarding arrangements and protects vulnerable groups effectively. The Government look to all the agencies and stakeholder organisations involved to reaffirm their collective, long-term commitment to working together effectively to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
I turn now in more detail to the work that is being done, and to the points at the heart of the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, Central. On the subject of the IMPACT programme, the key strand of work is on the development of new national information-sharing capabilities across the police service. The IMPACT programme is charged with delivering seven of the recommendations made by Sir Michael Bichard, but it has a much wider remit to tackle the root causes of the problems that led to the failings in the use and sharing of information and intelligence across the police service identified in Sir Michael’s report. The programme aims to transform the ability of the police service to exploit its intelligence and other operational information much more effectively, which will enable it to manage and share its information more efficiently. Most importantly, it will progressively improve the service’s ability to prevent and detect crime and to protect the public.
Change will not be achieved by the introduction of technology alone. We do not want to introduce technical fixes to operational problems that fail to deliver the promised benefits, which is why the impact programme is determinedly a business change programme. The aim is to change the way in which the police service manages and shares its operational information. The process will be enabled and supported by technical solutions that are carefully designed with specific operational processes in mind and matched to those business processes.
The IMPACT programme is delivering that capability incrementally, giving the police service time to develop its business processes in a way that delivers the benefits. The programme has learned from past experience. The big bang approach to rolling out new capabilities seldom delivers the promised benefits. The Government have learned across the piece from numerous programmes that introducing technology with an incremental build de-risks programmes and is by far the safest way to proceed.
In that context, I can report substantial progress on the impact programme over the past year. Just over 12 months ago, the programme delivered the IMPACT nominal index, to which my hon. Friend has referred, to the child abuse investigation units of each of the 43 forces in England and Wales, thus fulfilling our commitment to implement Sir Michael Bichard’s second recommendation. However, I want to pick up my hon. Friend’s point about the INI being used
primarily in child abuse cases. Child abuse cases amount to about 80 per cent. of inquiries, but the INI has been used to support other inquiries and has been trialled in other areas. On the advice of ACPO, we have not yet rolled it out more widely due to the likely demand caused by inter-force inquiries. I hope that I have answered my hon. Friend, but we must bear in mind the purpose behind the programme.
The INI enables an investigating officer in any force to establish whether another force holds information about a person of interest and where that information is held, which is an entirely new operational capability. Previously, unless information about a person of interest was held on one of the central systems, such as the police national computer, or unless the investigating officer had some particular reason to approach another force, the information would have been invisible to him. Given that most operational information is held in local force systems, that was a serious deficiency.
My hon. Friend has spoken about duplication. He has suggested that the existence of 43 million records would result in a lot of duplication on the INI, which is not the case. There will be more than one record per person, if a person has come to the attention of the police more than once, whether that involved the same force or different forces. Some people rightly have multiple records on the INI.
Mr. Illsley: I wish to pursue that matter a little further. The index system, by necessity, has to duplicate the record that it is searching for. If a police force uses the index system and a record is flagged up as being available in another force, the only way to obtain it is to duplicate it. Every time an inquiry goes ahead, that piece of information will be duplicated. Clearing the system of old information will keep it under control, but by necessity it lends itself to duplication in any event.
Joan Ryan: I take my hon. Friend’s point, but I do not think that the index system duplicates the record in the system. However, he knows that we are taking the first steps and that we wish to move towards the sort of system that he outlined earlier, which is the journey that we are on—there may be some disagreement about the journey itself, but there is no disagreement about where we want to go. However, I note what my hon. Friend has said. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why we are on the journey.
In accordance with the priority highlighted in Sir Michael’s report, we have concentrated deployment of the system in police child abuse investigation units, and it has proved to be extremely valuable. It has opened up some significant new lines of inquiry for the police, and since the INI was launched the volume of information on the system has doubled.
We now have more than 45 million named link records, and the police have made more than 106,000 enquiries on the system, of which around 80 per cent. relate to child protection. More than 10 per cent. of the child protection checks have resulted in requests to other forces for access to their information, and in a third of those cases the officers involved assessed the information that they received as being of direct relevance to their inquiries. We estimate that in more
than 600 of the child protection cases that the police dealt with last year, the information that they uncovered using the INI led them to take significantly different decisions, which must indicate a real improvement in the level of protection that the police can now offer to vulnerable children.
The remit of the IMPACT programme was originally limited to forces in England and Wales, but it has attracted much interest from other policing agencies, who are now influencing its development. By the end of March, Scottish police forces, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the British Transport police will be able to link up to the INI, and a number of other policing agencies are in line to gain access to the system during the next year. That will increase the number of records on the system to more than 50 million. That will not only help decision making within police forces and enforcement agencies, but enhance the CRB’s vetting process, as it has access to the same records.
I am pleased to report that the IMPACT programme has just been awarded the central e-government award for team excellence for delivery of the INI. It was also highly commended in the technology category of the civil service awards for 2006. That recognises the success of the programme in working with its partners to deliver real business benefits. I am sure that hon. Members will join me in congratulating those involved.
Where the INI is already delivering major benefits, it is the first step in our plans to provide new capabilities in an incremental and modular way. The INI provides an index to nominal records in local force systems. We now want to provide access to the records themselves and to extend the information available to include objects, locations and events as well as people.
There is a software application that enables information to be pooled for access by all forces connected to it. A new common data scheme also exists, which enables information from myriad different systems to be shared in a common format. CRISP, the cross-regional information sharing project, is designed to be an interim solution and the data scheme will provide the long-term basis for information sharing across the police service. The programme has taken over responsibility for developing and testing the software and the data scheme. The latter is now ready for service and forces are in the process of extracting the information from their systems and transforming it to be loaded to a central data warehouse for sharing.
The programme is now in dialogue with potential commercial suppliers to host and support the delivery of the system. However, a problem has been encountered with the software itself, to which my hon. Friend referred. Tests using large numbers of records have revealed that the response time for search operations is unacceptably slow. Following investigation and consultation with potential suppliers and the wider IT industry, it was concluded that it is likely that a new search engine will have to be incorporated into the application. The cost and delivery implications are currently under investigation, but unfortunately it means that there will inevitably be some slippage in the time scale for deployment of the system.
The programme has also made significant progress towards the development and introduction of the police national database, which is a single source of operational policing information, linking information held on local systems with that held on the police national computer and other national systems.
I have reported on the development of the IMPACT programme and the progress made with implementing the first and second recommendations of Sir Michael Bichard’s report. My hon. Friend also referred to the technology available in Scotland’s police system and to the Metropolitan police. The Scottish system makes available what we would call intelligence—information that has been evaluated. We want to make both information and intelligence available, so we will need a different functionality from the Scottish system. That is the ambition. We hope also to have the ability to link that to the PNC, which holds the conviction data. That would provide a one-stop shop for information and is a different system from that to which my hon. Friend referred. Police forces in Scotland and elsewhere are interested in the system that we are developing.
Sir Michael Bichard’s fourth recommendation was on securing the future of the PNC, which is crucial. Earlier this month, the PNC application was successfully loaded on to a new hardware platform by the police IT organisation, following a project sponsored by the IMPACT programme. That will ensure that the PNC remains resilient and fully functional until it is replaced by the PND. As I said, the IMPACT programme is not just about installing new IT systems, as helping the police service to deliver the business change needed to exploit those capabilities effectively and to get the best out of its information assets is also crucial to the success of the programme.
The statutory code of practice on the management of police information, which came into effect in November 2005, underpins all the projects. In March last year, ACPO published detailed guidance that provides the practical detail required to ensure compliance with the code of practice. The national intelligence model, the code and the guidance provide the core of the business change agenda to be delivered by the programme and will improve the way in which, and the consistency with which, forces manage, share and exploit information.
The hon. Members for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and for Taunton made good points about the 43 separate police forces and how there have been different levels of co-operation over the years. Those forces could indeed purchase their own 43 different systems should they so require. A positive outcome of the debate on police force mergers last year, however, was the realisation among forces of the need to co-operate more effectively, not least on protective services. The NPIA will, of course, be a further catalyst for closer working while also recognising the independence of local forces and their police authorities.
During the past year, the IMPACT programme has worked with forces to help them to implement the requirements. A comprehensive capability assessment was completed last summer, and as a result, all forces will have the plans, policies and infrastructure in place by the end of next month to enable them to achieve full compliance across all business areas by December
2010. More recently, the programme has been managing a peer review process to establish the state of preparedness in individual forces. Inevitably, there remain some significant challenges to overcome, but most forces recognise the breadth of change needed to achieve full compliance by 2010. They have responded positively and have either put or are putting in place the resources needed. The results of the reviews are being fed back to forces and used to focus the effort provided by the programme to support compliance activity. I am pleased to report substantial progress on the IMPACT programme, but we must not lose sight of the fact that it remains a complex and challenging process.
The programme requires a significant investment of resources by the Home Office and by forces. We have, to date, already invested more than £70 million in the IMPACT programme. We have discussed the considerable pressures on the Home Office budget at present and we are engaged in a fundamental review of our expenditure plans. We remain fully committed to delivering the aims and objectives of the IMPACT programme, and are conscious that ACPO has rated it as its core priority. There are no guarantees that the programme will not have to share some of the cost savings that we must make. However, there are guarantees that we will meet the 31 recommendations.
In accordance with good practice, the programme has been continually evaluating all the options that would allow it to deliver maximum value to the police service within difficult budgetary profiles while capitalising as much as possible on the investment made by the Home Office and police forces. Ministers will shortly review the outcomes of the latest evaluation and we shall announce our conclusions.
I hope that I have covered the points raised by hon. Members. We have had a good and wide-ranging debate on a very important issue that remains a priority for the Government, the Home Office and ACPO.
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