Shared ambition

Policing is at its best when officers have the right information at the right moment. Data underpins almost everything the service does – from preventing crime and identifying offenders to acting as evidence, keeping victims updated, and working with the wider criminal justice system.

Yet, like many complex public services, policing’s data landscape has evolved organically over decades. The result is familiar to many officers and staff: varying local practices, fragmented systems, poor data quality, and information that can be difficult to access or use.

The Government’s latest policing White Paper rightly places data at the heart of modernising law enforcement. It sets out a vision for moving policing data from a patchwork of varying use to a national asset across a joined-up ecosystem. Central to that ambition is the new National Data and Analytics Office (NDAO) and National Data Integration and Exploitation Service (NDIES), which will bring national and local datasets together and create a single national decision-maker. Strong underpinning data will also be key to the new £115 million investment in Police AI.

These reforms are promising and the direction is right. But the real challenge lies ahead: what will it actually take to make seamless data-sharing a day-to-day reality across forces, systems and the wider criminal justice system?

1. Underpin national strategy with a clear framework

The White Paper recognises that outdated, ambiguous or conflicting legislation can mean that police officers are left fighting crime “with one hand tied behind their backs”. This is as true of data-sharing as it is operational policing. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 clarifies various points on how police use data, but to truly streamline and accelerate data-sharing, more work is required.

Establishing clear legal bases for sharing data is a good starting point. The potential use cases for sharing data between police forces, with the criminal justice system, and with government partners such as local authorities are endless. For different organisations to reach varying decisions, they need to put legislation into practice, pick apart statutory obligations, decide whether DPA 2018, CLPD, or the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 have precedence, and layer on considerations from other legal frameworks, such as in financial services or health and social care. Encoding this bilaterally in Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) or Information Sharing Agreements (ISAs) between pairs of organisations is often seen as part the audit trail – but it adds to the paperwork burden and can rapidly become unsustainable across all the partners involved in policing and the wider system.

Moving this to a national footing – aligning differences between permissive and restrictive data-sharing legislation, clarifying the legal basis for sharing, ensuring it is necessary and proportionate, and targeting more consistency – would cut duplication and provide a stronger foundation for data-sharing.

Streamlining governance is just as important. This means having the right data-sharing agreements in place between organisations, with clear terms and conditions for how data can be used, as well as the necessary gateways and connectivity. Crucially, data should be made available as soon as approval is granted, enabling officers to get on with the job at hand rather than waiting for processes to catch up. Decisions about what, when and how much to share still need to sit with the data owner – but having an automated system primed for immediately sharing once approval is granted would remove significant friction.

2. Strip out technology friction

Officers often face systems that don’t talk to one another, duplicate data entry, or bury crucial information behind multiple log-ins. Different data standards between forces and incompatible record-management systems create hesitation and slow operational tempo.

Fixing this requires better interoperability and platforms designed with frontline users in mind. UK police forces collectively invest £2 billion a year in technology, but around 97 per cent of that spending goes on maintaining legacy systems. Police Reform and the creation of the National Police Service provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consolidate, align and integrate legacy police systems, pooling resources and data.

The Government’s independent review of force structures – which will make evidence-based recommendations on how to restructure policing into fewer, larger forces – is right to give weight to opportunities for IT integration. There is already a proven route for bringing forces together on shared regional Records Management Solutions, and because only a handful of these systems are in use nationally, they offer a useful place to begin consolidation. Once that groundwork is in place, other essential systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning and Command & Control, could be aligned using shared services structures.

Implementation will also need to take account of whether use cases are operational. This is more likely to contain personal data and more frequently benefit from real-time connectivity, compared with Business Intelligence (BI) requirements, which are more likely to work with aggregated statistical data.

3. Incentivise data-sharing

The 2025 Data-Sharing and Collaboration Report recognised that the ‘provider’ of data takes on the effort and risk of sharing data – with fears of misuse and reputational damage acting as significant barriers – while it is the ‘receiver’ that ultimately benefits.

The NDIES will provide the infrastructure for data-sharing and will promote greater connectivity between systems, but if forces have to commit considerable time and resources to make data available, it will pull them away from core duties. Better incentives and resources are therefore needed to address this imbalance, including more centralised support that provides finances, expertise, resources, and assurance that downstream data owners will manage downstream risk.

For example, policing should incentivise commercial technology suppliers to build secure, automated ways to integrate and share data. This involves complying with data standards, providing secure APIs to enable data access and integration, and giving integrated access where separate forces have separate implementations of the same underlying system. Data-sharing through these integrations would still be subject to governance and approval. But with the facilities built in to rapidly automate data-sharing on receipt of approval, suppliers can remove friction from the system.

Measures such as these can help make data-sharing the norm – moving away from manual data extracts and individually crafted point-to-point data-sharing, to a more deliberate, system-wide approach that spans policing.

Data foundations for AI-enabled policing

Artificial intelligence (AI) has huge potential to improve productivity and reduce harm. It is already supporting policing in practical ways: automated transcription, redaction, translation, call handling, video triage, and witness statement summarisation. But AI is only as effective as the data that underpins it.

A 2025 Police Foundation report highlighted the risk of forces pursuing locally developed or ‘homegrown’ AI solutions without national coordination. Many sectors beyond policing are grappling with how to move AI from pilot to real-world impact. To unlock real value, AI must be applied to real policing problems, underpinned by high-quality data at national, regional and local levels, and supported by clear governance, strong ethical standards and a culture of shared learning. Without this, AI will remain fragmented and experimental. With it, there is an opportunity to scale solutions like Police AI nationally and deliver tangible benefits for officers and the public.

As policing makes better use of data, it must also work proactively to protect public trust – upholding the principle of ‘policing by consent’ and addressing understandable concerns about surveillance or over-reach. A major public dialogue study commissioned in 2025 found that while the public sees benefits in AI, there is significant hesitance about its use in sensitive policing contexts. Trust must be actively built through transparency and safeguards. Policing should take a proactive approach: engage communities, oversight bodies, and civil society partners in a national conversation about how AI underpinned by good data keeps people safe.

Alongside this, robust control and audit regimes can be used to ensure appropriate use of AI. When officers and staff have greater access to data, the system must be able to identify mistakes – or misconduct – quickly.

Ethics counsellors and data-use advisors can support frontline staff in navigating the grey areas and making the right choices.

What happens now matters most

The police White Paper correctly recognises that data and technology are central to policing in an era where crime is constantly evolving. Its proposals provide a solid platform for data-sharing, but success will depend on consistent, disciplined implementation.

Policing has the chance to build a data environment that empowers frontline officers, strengthens public trust, and enables collaboration across government. Delivering that vision means aligning legislation, governance, technology and incentives – not as a one-off programme, but as a sustained shift in how policing works. If policing gets this right, data will no longer be a barrier or a burden. It will be the backbone of a safer, more responsive, more connected police service.

Robert Walker is a data expert at PA Consulting.