This paper sets out our view on the current landscape, drawing on the NPCC Policing Problem Book, the government’s From Local to National white paper, and the Hogan-Howe review. It offers Cloud Gateway’s perspective of the underlying infrastructure conditions – what they make harder, what they make possible, and where the practical starting points are.
Three major documents, the NPCC Problem Book, From Local to National, and the Hogan-Howe review – are converging on the same underlying questions: interoperability, shared capability, and data standards. That alignment is significant as it creates a stronger mandate for action than policing has had in years.
The infrastructure reality is straightforward: around £590 million of a roughly £2 billion annual IT budget goes on maintaining legacy on-premise systems. Wholesale replacement is neither feasible nor advisable. But incremental, well-sequenced steps toward shared, standards-aligned infrastructure improve the security position now, reduce cost over time, and mean that whatever operational structures are implemented, the technical foundations are in place to support them.
The 2023 supply chain incidents and the PSNI breach, with recovery costs estimated at £174–217 million, show what the current structural exposure means in practice. These were not policing failures, they were a distributed, on-premise model becoming visible as a risk which has a direct impact on operational policing and staff and officer’s ability to do their jobs.
Our view is that the near-term priority is sequencing: identify the infrastructure changes that unlock the most across the problem set, and start there, before structures change, not after. Naturally, this sits alongside broader transformational programmes of work which unlock potential within operational policing, both easing wait times, overrun systems and staff.
