McFarland Report claims PITO has failed to meet the needs of the service

The review, carried out by Robert McFarland, was finally released by the Home Office last week, four months after its initial internal publication.

The report will make grim reading for PITO, finding the organisation failed to establish a good relationship with its stakeholders when it was first formed. It goes on to outline the potential structure and working arrangements for the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA).

PITO was originally formed with the intention of providing central ICT direction to help local forces converge their services, and took control of the 1994 NSPIS programme to achieve this aim.

But the rapidly changing ICT environment of the late nineties led to the Programme Valiant report that eventually formed the ISS4PS strategy. McFarland describes the program as providing an opportunity for PITO to establish joint ownership with the police of a new ICT strategy, but that the opportunity was wasted because PITO failed to develop a business case for ISS4PS due to being “committed to pressing ahead with NSPIS regardless”.

It states that when ISS4PS was adopted by ACPO, PITO failed to work with police and force IT Directors to make sure the standard was adopted and fully aligned with local IT strategies.

PITO is further criticised for approaching NSPIS “less as a strategy and more as a series of projects”, and that the NSPIS experience has “indelibly tainted” PITO’s relationship with the police, who on the whole view the program as expensive, technically backward and late – “yesterday’s technology tomorrow”, as one commentator observed. The report draws the conclusion that: “PITO has demonstrably not provided what its customers wanted when they wanted it.”

With its working relationship with primary stakeholders compromised, PITO’s influence deteriorated. The original plan would be for forces to pay PITO for ICT services delivered, while the Home Office funded costs of central management. In practice local forces held onto their ICT budgets, which make up some 85 per cent of the national total of £750 million, and the Home Office was forced to pay directly for most national projects.

With the Home Office serving on PITO’s executive management and providing the funding for ‘mission critical’ projects, PITO effectively became indistinguishable from a Home Office department.

A stakeholder survey showed that more than 60 per cent were ‘quite dissatisfied’ overall with the performance of PITO, and only seven per cent said that they were quite satisfied. While the report noted that most criticisms from IT Directors were made “more in sorrow than anger”, several contributors had criticised the organisation for consisting of “a few good people, but many passengers”.

The second half of the report contains an outline for supplying national police ICT needs through the NPIA, which will support a new tripartite model for national police governance. The body is to be jointly managed by ACPO and the APA, while the balance will possibly be made up from CJIT, the Home Office and ‘independents’. The most significant area of change is that the 43 different forces will be represented via seven or eight Combined Police Delivery Groups (CPDGs) – possibly based on ACPO regional structures – which will work directly with the new Police National ICT Group. The Home Secretary can set up a body similar to PNICTG without needing primary legislation, and the report recommends this as a method of creating an exploratory pilot for the NPIA.

The new model also proposes that the current rapid growth in national police information databases necessitates management and service delivery by a separate stakeholder.

Police Professional will be covering the McFarland Report in greater details in a later issue