![](https://emergencyservicestimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ESS-Button-resized.png")
UK policing is a big spender when it comes to technology, so when a national report on the state of digital government shows that the blockers to getting it right are no different to those experienced in policing, the timing is right to talk to NPCC Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Lead Chief Constable, Rob Carden.
He talks to me about what law enforcement can do to increase productivity through smart use of technology and how that can release more time for police officers to deliver the all important Safer Streets mission for the new government.
Last week, the government published a report, State of digital government review, which set out a range of barriers that are preventing the public sector from maximising its use of technology to deliver services to the public.
A major barrier is the reduction in public sector productivity, leading to a whopping “£45bn per year of unrealised savings and productivity benefits.” Another barrier is fragmentation of public sector technology adoption where one organisation develops its own solution and it isn’t scaled up for others to benefit. And in a third example, the report says how critical services rely on ‘decades-old legacy technology’ but ‘most public sector organisations do not have comprehensive registers or quantification of the legacy risk they carry.’
This report includes input from ten police forces ranging in size from the Met to Wiltshire. The day before this report came out, I attended a City Forum event all about digital policing where Chief Constable Rob Carden listed the same problems holding back policing’s digital transformation.
So, the question is, if the problems are systemic across the public sector, what can policing do by itself to solve the problems? For him, the opportunity lies in the police reform agenda, and he refers to two influential reports from the Police Foundation on how to unlock the potential of DDaT in policing and the march to a national approach to overcome ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
“Policing needs to be a better customer and know what they want from technology.”
The Police Foundation research suggests that 90% of police IT spend is on servicing what is known as technical debt – keeping the lights on. Rob says if that’s the case, it leaves little capacity to innovate and it is stifled as a result. One way to deal with that is to reduce the burden of existing systems and use technology to increase efficiency. Taking a national approach to doing this will be important for its success.
“We need to galvanise chiefs to come together and deal with the difficulties of a fragmented model that is based on 43 forces in England and Wales.”
One way of dealing with the frictions of the fragmented model is to create something “more muscular” at the centre, he says. The Home Secretary is not unsympathetic to a new way of working as she indicated in her speech to the NPCC/APCC conference in November.
The nascent National Policing Data Analytics Office is “a really exciting development,” he says, as he asserts that data is policing’s most important asset after its people. “Despite the fragmented landscape, you’ve got the opportunity to collect the data once, use it many times and have a whole system approach.” That data then is the bedrock of tools built to fight crime and increase public safety.
“In the digital world we live in, you can’t have policing without technology.”
When it comes to delivering on the government’s Safer Streets mission, he says that freeing up time through redaction tools for example, means those resources can go to the frontline to better tackle crime, better protect the public and in turn, increase public confidence in policing. Measuring the increase in productivity is tricky and involves working out what the benefits are and how they are realised. It’s the key to unlock funding to pay for the innovation in the first place. “Policing needs to be more sophisticated in doing this,” he adds.
Rob mentions online CCTV image sharing as an example of saving police time. Instead of police officers knocking on doors asking for footage in the aftermath of an incident, some forces are encouraging CCTV owners to register their cameras with police forces to make sharing images quicker and easier. West Midlands is doing this and recently shared that it has over 20,000 cameras registered with the force. Rob’s force in Cumbria is doing the same thing with its Camera Registry Programme. I wonder if the metrics are being worked up to show how much time could be saved based on previous experience because that’s a perfect example of releasing productivity through technology.
“It can always be better,” responds Rob when I ask him how local initiatives are scaled up when they work. The long-term aim is to create tools once and well, that can be used nationally in a way that is more cost effective. However, he remains clear that he doesn’t want a national drive to override or water down local approaches. He offers the example of Bedfordshire Police using Riven to redact documents at scale and adds that changes to the inspection regime will also shine a spotlight on how forces are using innovative technology approaches. Days after we speak, HMICFRS published its latest inspection report into Bedfordshire Police and it lauds the work done by the force as “notable.”
Part of Rob’s mission is to encourage forces to focus innovation on a small number of key problems that affect policing’s ability to keep the public safe, using the resources they have now in a pragmatic acceptance that new funding is not coming any time soon. “Word spreads quickly in policing” he says, so people know who’s doing what and there is a curiosity too.
Returning to the national report on the state of digital government, it says that the root causes of the problems in the public sector (or barriers as I frame this above) lie in a combination of variable leadership, organisational fragmentation, inadequate measurement of results, a dearth of talent and lack of funding. It’s pretty damning stuff but Rob seems determined to drive the pace of change in policing as he says he is in the twilight of his career and “has nothing to lose.”
Ordinarily that might mean someone would slow down, but that’s not the case here, while Rob spends his time making the endless trips from London to Penrith driving the DDaT cause, he’s got plenty of energy to succeed and I have no doubt he will.
Read the Police Foundation reports for more detail on this topic. The Power of Information and Fit for the Future: the case for a reformed national policing landscape.
