The Funding Crisis

The National Audit Office report reveals how fragmented and stop-start technology investment has left police forces unable to adopt new technologies or benefit from expected productivity improvements at a national level.

During the 2024-25 financial year, the Treasury provided £234 million over four years to help fund police technology investments, including £55.5 million that year. The Home Office used this funding to support rollout of technologies including live facial recognition, drones, automated public contact systems, and artificial intelligence.

However, the Treasury discontinued this funding stream from the 2025-26 financial year. Consequently, the Home Office hasn't allocated funding for some projects like live facial recognition, and reduced funding for others including knife detection technology.



The fundamental problem remains clear: investment in new technology is severely hindered by the overwhelming need to maintain existing systems. When 97% of budgets go toward keeping current infrastructure operational, there's virtually nothing left for modernisation or innovation.

Systemic Barriers to Progress

The NAO previously identified that across government, digital transformation faces barriers including inappropriate funding models, underestimated scope of early work, and lack of necessary skills or leadership.

The National Police Chiefs' Council discovered that the absence of a single policing voice leads to unclear decision-making and insufficient prioritisation of science and technology across policing. Additional challenges include recruiting and retaining skilled digital workforce, maintaining legacy systems that restrict ability to invest in new technology, financial constraints causing inconsistent digital transformation, poor data quality, and insufficient support for change management.

The Home Office acknowledges its funding approach—which created multiple funding streams for technology—made it more difficult for police forces to decide how to invest in new technology, limiting longer-term planning and rollout.

Real-World Consequences

The impact of inadequate funding and strategy manifests in concrete failures. Earlier this year, the police services crime intelligence database received a "Red" risk rating from the government's projects watchdog as technical teams struggled to migrate from a legacy Oracle platform.

The Police National Database was meant to transition to cloud infrastructure, but procurement for this move has been delayed by over a year. Elements of the current transformation programme include transitioning to cloud-native architecture, enhancing system usability, and updating or replacing obsolete Oracle databases and middleware.

A government transparency notice from 2024 stated bluntly that the Police National Database transformation is being delivered to address technological debt causing a failing service.

The Vicious Circle

This situation creates a vicious circle. Legacy systems consume virtually all available budget for maintenance. Without investment in modernisation, those systems age further, becoming even more expensive to maintain whilst growing increasingly unreliable. Meanwhile, opportunities to improve productivity through new technologies remain perpetually out of reach.

The stop-start nature of funding exacerbates the problem. Short-term funding streams prevent long-term planning. Projects begin, then lose funding before completion. This creates additional technical debt as partially implemented systems require ongoing support without delivering intended benefits.

The Cost to Public Safety

When police forces cannot invest in modern technology, the impact extends beyond IT departments. Officers lack tools that could improve productivity and effectiveness. Intelligence systems struggle to provide timely information. Public contact channels remain inefficient. Crime prevention technologies like facial recognition and knife detection cannot be deployed at scale.

The £2 billion annual technology spending sounds substantial, but when 97% maintains legacy systems, only £60 million remains for all innovation, transformation, and new capability development across all police forces in England and Wales.

The question becomes: how long can critical public services operate with IT infrastructure consuming nearly all resources just to remain functional, leaving virtually nothing for improvement or modernisation?

Break the Legacy System Cycle

At Altiatech, we help organisations escape the trap of legacy system maintenance consuming all available resources. Our approach focuses on strategic modernisation that gradually reduces technical debt whilst maintaining operational stability, creating capacity for genuine innovation.

Whether you're managing ageing infrastructure, planning cloud migrations, or struggling with fragmented technology investment, our team provides practical strategies for breaking the cycle of perpetual maintenance.

Get in touch:

📧 Email: innovate@altiatech.com
📞 Phone (UK): +44 (0)330 332 5482

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