NPIA to license award-winning IT system that will earn police service £5m and save forces millions

The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is set to earn £5 million for the police service by licensing its award-winning information sharing technology in a groundbreaking deal. It is the first time the NPIA is using one of its products to make money for the service.

The NPIA’s Code List Management System (CLMS) won the Police Force Technology Award at the Emergency Service Awards.
CLMS is a web service which makes it easier for police forces to share data standards and develop interfaces. Benefits include better data quality and search accuracy, more efficient distribution of lists and less duplication of information across the police service.

Following widespread interest in CLMS across government and the private sector, the NPIA has awarded a contract to business process services provider Liberata to license and sell it to the wider market.

The new deal gives the NPIA an agreed percentage of the revenue, which is likely to make the police service £5 million over the next five years. In addition to this, £1.5 million could be saved through the free use of the service to the NPIA and police forces which is also part of the agreement.

Police will not be the only beneficiary: there will be free use of CLMS across government with further potential savings of up to £10 million for government departments.

This has been made possible by the Treasury’s ‘Wider Markets Initiative’ which encourages government agencies to realise the value of their assets.

Chief Constable Nick Gargan, chief executive of the NPIA said: “CLMS means better information sharing which means better policing. Information is vital to help police officers do their job and bring offenders to justice.

“Providing officers with timely and accurate information, allows them to make informed operational decisions.”
Dermot Joyce, chief executive of Liberata, added that it was a “ground-breaking and innovative deal”.

CLMS has been used by the NPIA as a vital part of its Police National Database (PND) programme. The service has helped manage the flow of information from dozens of police systems into one common database. Using CLMS has reduced costs of the programme, timescales and improved data quality. The estimated value of these benefits to the programme is between £1-2 million.