A new police national database has been welcomed as a "major new weapon in the battle against crime" by the man who investigated police intelligence handling in the Soham Inquiry.
In his 2004 report, which followed the murder of two Soham schoolgirls, Sir Michael Bichard called for a national police intelligence system to be set up as a priority.
Bichard told ZDNet UK's sister site, silicon.com, that in commissioning the Police National Database (PND), a key step has been taken towards centralising all police intelligence in England and Wales.
"This was one of the key recommendations of my Soham Inquiry and the new system will be a major new weapon in the battle to prevent and detect crime," he said.
Bichard's comments came after a Logica-headed consortium was awarded the £75.6m contract to deliver the first phase of the PND — namely to design, build and operate the system — by the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA).
The PND will be able to automatically pull intelligence on people, objects, locations and events from the hundreds of incompatible local systems used by the 43 forces in England and Wales.
It will bring copies of data from five operational areas of policing — custody, crime, intelligence, child abuse and domestic abuse — into one central system.
It has taken five years since the Bichard Inquiry for work to start on the PND, and the government has previously watered down its targets, changing a pledge that the database would be fully operational by 2010 (contained in the Home Office's third progress report on the Bichard Inquiry's recommendations) to "deployment of the first phase of PND" in the subsequent report.
There remains uncertainty over when all police forces will have access to the information on the PND — with indications from Logica that this may not happen until 2013.
Steve Minter, director of justice and home affairs for Logica, told silicon.com that the first four years of the seven-year contract "are mainly about the rollout".
"The first phase starts to be delivered in 2010. That is the time at which the capability starts to become available for some forces, those early adopters," he said.
A spokesman for the NPIA said that the Home Office target to have "deployment of the first phase in 2010" did not mean the first phase had to be fully completed by that date.
"Our position is that we will meet the milestone as it said the PND will be operational by 2010. I do not think it is going to be for every force but it is an operational deployment."
Bichard acknowledged the PND had been some time coming saying: "Clearly the programme has experienced some delay but I do want to congratulate the Impact Team who have demonstrated skill and determination to get us to this point."
The Impact programme contains a package of measures aimed at reforming the way information is handled across the forces in England and Wales. It includes the PND, the Impact Nominal Index and new standards for information management.
