We put the data up as a Google spreadsheet.

50% of spend by 4 depts

89 departments and other gov organisations have spent 5,957k on G-Cloud. Average spend per department is 67k – however, the spend is heavily skewed to a few government departments who are leading the way:

• 19% of spend is by the top 1 dept, DWP
• 50% of spend is by the top 4 depts, DWP, NHS, Cabinet Office and MoJ
• 75% of spend is by the top 14 depts.

In our own market, public safety/security, policing and defence there hasn’t been much spend yet.

51% of spend to 4 suppliers

There are 458 suppliers in the market place, and 75% of these are SMEs. However, only 51 suppliers (11% of the 458) have sales. Average spend per supplier is 117k – however:

• 24% of spend went to the top supplier, Emergn
• 51% of spend went to the top 4 suppliers, Emergn, BJSS, Huddle and Microsoft
• 76% of spend went to the top 14 suppliers.

33% of spend is on two large business relationships

Emergn’s work at DWP (1,125k) and BJSS’s at NHS (843k) are the two largest business relationships, and between them have taken 33% of the spend.

Consulting is beating *AAS, taking 61% of spend

The headline figures show:

• 61% of spend on Lot 4 Specialist Cloud Services, which since Gii includes Agile development and management services
• 32% on spend on Lot 3 Software as a Service
• 7% of spend on Platform and Infrastructure as a Service (PAAS and IAAS).

Looking at the Emergn and BJSS business relationships again, both of these are G-Cloudi Lot 4 - Specialist Cloud Services. What’s that? Looking at the Cloudstore (a beta-labelled website that’s a little unwieldy and sometimes confusing), you can see that Emergn offer a range of agile consulting services (“delivery”, “coaching”, “training”, “advisory” etc), the most common prices for which are in the £1,000-1,600 range, so we guess that’s consulting by the day. Similarly BJSS, whose rate is a more reasonable £675.

Consulting may be an easier buy than *AAS – the hope must be that evens out. Even if it doesn’t G-Cloud appears to offer a useful procurement pathway for consulting.

SME spend is unclear

We can’t easily tell whether suppliers identify themselves as Micro, Small, Medium (SME) or L enterprises – perhaps GPS could indicate that in the next release of sales data. Looking at the top dozen vendors by spend, BJSS and Microsoft aren’t SMEs. The status of Emergn and Huddle is unclear: their headcount puts them in the M bracket in SME, but Ihaven’t seen their financials. Lets call them M. We’ve taken a quick look at some of the other suppliers and estimated their size. So we reckon (emphasis on “reckon”) that the spend going to SMEs is somewhere between 46% and 69%. (Nb that the definition of “SME” is probably larger than most of us naturally think.)

Of course, we don’t have sales data from any other procurement framework with which to make comparisons.

Is G-Cloud worth it?

For purchasers, it must be easier than many procurement routes, and is beginning to get some good momentum. Bravo GDS. We haven’t seen any of our public sector customers using it yet – though they’re keeping an eye on it.

For suppliers, 89% of those on the framework have no sales at all yet. The spend distribution looks like a long tail, but perhaps that’s to be expected. We aren’t a supplier on G-Cloud but are watching it. If you have a good *AAS or agile consulting service and want to sell to government, it looks interesting.

Corrections are welcome, There is much more analysis that could be done. The Google doc is here.

.

With increased focus on Mobbu, our people and products as well as continuing to keep the community informed and engaged via our blog.

We could not have done this work with out the considerable help, ideas and cajoling from our great team of suppliers: Osomi, Fran Swaine & Mat Keller

Our old site had served us well for quite a long time but was starting to get a little long in the tooth.

We took the plunge to work with external creative talent to take our strong brand and make us a simple, effective, well written & reactive design.

Lead by Fran and Ruth at Osomi the project has not taken long and has delivered what we  were looking for. They took the time to understand us and worked in a very iterative fashion, well suited to our Scrum / Agile approach to the world.

Fran Swaine helped us shrink the total number of words while delivering our message in an engaging manner true to who we are.

Mat Keller bridged the gap between creative and technical for us, bringing the designs to life in a reactive manner, meaning the site works well across many platforms.

The process has been fun, easy and delivered the website we wanted, so thank you all.

Internally, we should not forget the work that Stace and Adam have done tirelessly in the background in supporting this project whilst very busy in their day jobs.

1. One database to rule them all

2. Google my many databases

3. See the wood for the trees/systems of insight

1. One database to rule them all

The first generation of intelligence systems were record management systems: Northgate Guardian (pdf), Niche, SAS’s Memex, etc. These generally operate at the police force level. The national equivalent is the NPIA’s Police National Database programme, built by Logica. The central metaphor is that you’re gradually creating a single, trusted, authoritative database that you’ll consult often.

2. Google my many databases

Then came a wave of vendors whose products let you grab data from multiple data sources to put together an over-arching view – and here searching is typically the metaphor. Bluestar’s Single Enterprise View being one example of several.

3. See the wood for the trees/systems of insight

You now have a huge amount of data – how do you find the interesting bits? The next generation has companies that do two key things. Firstly, they bringing the flood of open, public information into the mix. Secondly, they help you find the most interesting needles in your many intel haystacks through visualisation and/or insight.

The visualisation companies can probably trace their history social network analysis – eg i2 (bought by IBM in 2011) and Org.net. There are several, but the most interesting to me looks like Cambridge Intelligence. It’s run by Joe Parry who is ex-i2 and will be speaking at Max Gadney’s excellent Design of Understanding conference. Joe’s series on time visualisation is excellent.

The insight vendors are an ambitious bunch. Palantir is the big player, and I’ll summarise their mission as surfacing insight from incomplete, messy data so that human analysts can make decisions. Large, well funded, they go for the very large North American contracts, and aren’t without criticism.

And further afield, there are systems like Recorded Future, which mines pubic information to make predictions. Their blog is interesting for its geo-political posts.

All interesting companies and products.

¹ These are quick notes, inevitably incomplete, and apologies to vendors misrepresented.

On 1 April 2012 these units transfer to SOCA, which itself is planned to transfer to the NCA in 2013:

• the Central Witness Bureau
• Crime Operational Support Unit
• the National Missing Persons’ Bureau
• Serious Crime Analysis Section
• Specialist Operations Centre

The Home Office envisages (leaving themselves some flexibility?) transferring these NPIA functions to the professional body:

• learning, development, strategy and curriculum
• authorised professional practice
• exams and assessments; the international academy
• the National College of Police Leadership
• uniformed operational support
• some specialist training
• the Criminal Justice and Local Policing Unit.

It’s unclear when that transfer will take place. The “police professional body, once established, [will] continue the NPIA’s existing and important relationship with the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism and the Home Office-funded Police National Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) Centre. The Office of Security and Counter Terrorism will continue to provide management support and oversee the CBRN Centre budget after the creation of the new body.”

In Autumn 2012 these functions transfer into the Home Office:

• Responsibility for the NPIA’s Police Science and Forensics services
• Policy for Police Special Constables
• The NPIA’s Automotive Equipment Section
• Management of the contract for the Airwave radio system and its replacement (including associated staff)
• Some policy responsibility for Police Workforce Strategy (though some will also sit with the PPB)
• The secretariat for the Reducing Bureaucracy programme
• The National Police Air Service project team (which will continue to report to Chief Constable Alex Marshall)
• Hendon Data Centre Services (HDS) as an interim measure – it’s not clear where it will ultimately live

And in 2013 these go to the NCA:

• the NPIA’s Proceeds of Crime Centre
• The NPIA’s statutory powers and responsibilities to train, accredit and monitor Financial Investigators

.

See also:

• Mar 2012: Home Office Ministerial statement and NPIA press release
• Dec 2011: Home Office statement on the future of the NPIA (and press release) – which announced that some functions would transfer to the NCA.
• In Jul 2011 the Home Sec announced that a new ICT company would be set up to manage large procurement projects. The Home Affairs Committee’s report A New Landscape of Policing has a good overview.
• Apr 2011: Neyroud review of police leadership and training

I was asked by someone in the office what would be my testing tips. They need to be concise enough to fit on a post-it note… I’m not sure if I can quite manage that but I have some tips that work for me I have some tips that work for me

• Know your product. So read userguides on how it’s expected to work. Talk to devs to find out how they think it works and then spend time yourself figuring out how it actually works. As a tester you should point out areas for future fixes. This will give you a good understanding and with the various points of view, you should have a rounded view without being too bias.
• Simplify your tests. Yes read the other blogs and take what you need from them. Do not implement a long winded way of doing a test when you know you could do it in a much simpler fashion and still achieve the same results. Why spend hours implementing something too complicated for your needs. If you take the simpler route you then have time to spend on exploratory testing! Fun!
• Change a variable at a time. Something that scares me slightly, if you find a bug, replicate it. Then attempt to replicate again but changing one variable at a time so you know what is having an impact. I’ve read and seen people deciding to change a few things in order to refine the bug replication steps and thus narrowing the search field for devs. I learnt the hard way when I started as a tester, you need to take your time and change it gradually, otherwise your pretty much voiding your results.
• Scripted and Exploratory testing combined. Both have their merits and serve me very well thank you! I’ve read and listened to testers that claim to use only one of these to the exclusion of the other. Seriously? How did you come up with your script to start with? Oh that’s right by carrying out some exploratory testing and discovering your product and understanding the testing you need to do. Once you have this script you can use it to build an automation suite! You can then use this automation/script to confirm the product is stable in future, then you can spend fun time doing exploratory testing! Our product evolves, so the script serves me well, I know what the product should and has in the past behaved correctly – I will add notes to my script if I think certain areas need some serious exploration (or a good poke in the face!). So I will use both and I’m working on automating some of my tests. So automate where you can, if you can or just use a script to check functionality – NOTE automation cannot replace eyeballing the product to confirm the UI displays correctly. Once you’ve done a sweep through, go have fun doing exploratory testing! That is the fun bit, trying to think of ways to blow stuff up!

Right so they won’t fit on a post-it, the main headlines of the points would… honestly! I’ll likely add to this or change my mind. It’s my prerogative as a tester

[Mobbu summer party photo by Áine]

And in the blink of an eye, we turned 400 weeks old – a couple of weeks ago. This is roughly what we were doing…

Will and Tom are putting the finishing touches on a major upgrade to the software product that runs at our police and other customers. Their code has fixed some bugs, improves many small things, and adds a massive new area of functionality is both more specialised for current customers while also being ready for a broader set of future customers with different messaging needs. I’m deliberately being vague about these magic templates so I don’t puncture customer confidentiality, but you should understand that it is brilliant.

Now and then I have been helping them out by barking hex codes at Tom and Will so they can try yet another colour palette to see if it’s slightly better than the last one. It’s hard to get right because there are several dimensions to design for: various messages types, day- and night-time use, BlackBerrys and laptops, projections and wall-screens – and some of these do weird things to colours.

Tom eventually managed to make his phone upgrade to iOS5. Stace has just returned from juggling the important holiday tasks of getting children to playgroups and playing Starcraft 2, and is getting his teeth back into running development things. The coffee machine got a breather whilst he and Adam were away.

And Áine has been making sure that it’s ready to go by performing loads of exploratory QA and a vicious series of automated unit, Selenium and performance tests. After that’s done, we’ll get everyone together and do a few rounds of tests on the streets of Brighton. (Week 402: Áine’s Irish dancing team just won second in the nationals and will be going to the world championships next year!)

Deployment isn’t a simultaneous “push” performed the moment that testing is complete – for security reasons, most of our customers currently run their systems on-premises, and we need to plan a time when they’re not going to be using the system intensely and when we can perform regular system health checks. We usually do the larger deployments on site to keep it all running smoothly. So Emma is getting dates in calendars and being ready to re-plan as needed.

Last week Adam was on holiday – we’re now at the size where, on average, someone’s usually on holiday – and has just returned. He’s punching the BlackBerrys to make their Over The Air updates work to his exacting standards. Matt and Rob are building a new User Acceptance Testing platform for us; after that they’ll upgrade our Development platform. The software moves from Dev to Staging to UAT to our Production platforms, and finally out to customers.

They’ve also been doing something complex with encryption that we can’t talk about yet. They’ve tweaked our Nagios monitoring, which will peep at us as soon as any hardware or services flap. Similarly, on the device side, there are diagnostics to review and update and some warranty returns to handle. Matt and Rob also tell me that they’ve started playing Starcraft 2, apparently to win rapid promotion (and I’m immediately reminded of playing Age of Empires with the others at Football365 in 1998ish – thus the wheel of history turns: the graphics get better but the dried-out eyes and RTS claw-hand remains the same).

But much of that work was interrupted by a massive outage at BlackBerry – the Ops maestros been talking to RIM, our mobile carriers, our customers, and checking whether our test and support devices are working properly. Since the BlackBerry is the only mobile data platform CAPS-approved for to Restricted in the UK, it will have affected a lot of police forces and government organisations. It was a quite a pain, and an important reminder to us of the basics: minimise your single points of failure, and communicate bad news quickly and clearly.

Brad and Emma have been meeting the delivery teams at two large customers to work through several security and infrastructure projects over the next few months. There are multiple organisations involved, so they are juggling scope, budgets, timescales, procurement process and compliance needs. Emma and Jez have been travelling between customers on training, support and account management missions, and getting ready for the software release.

Mark and Alex have been perma-road-tripping around the country talking to the many people in UK policing that we hope to win as customers. We’ve been working on how to package the product so that it can be sold to smaller groups while delivering better return on investment for the customer – it’s very encouraging that there’s a lot of interest. Policing is experiencing seismic change at the moment – budgets are being cut, national bodies are being re-organised (NCA, NPIA, Soca all affected), so we need to stay on the move, keep talking to people.

I’ve been thrashing lots of spreadsheets and looking at budgets. Dawn is locking down a lot of accounting details and managing the building work at our new office. Tyra has just returned from maternity leave – it’s good to have her back. She, Dawn and I are working out how we’ll work together to cover accounting, purchase and sales ledger, HR, payroll, office admin and a few big projects. We’re considering running finance and admin as weekly scrum sprints.

And that’s a flavour of our week 400.

.

Weeks 1-399 and 401+

In 2004, we formed the company around a single criminal justice project, which grew considerably, added a mobile dimension, and ran successfully for seven years. Since 2004 then we’ve got a lot done. We focused on mobile and security. We switched some years ago from an offshore development team to a UK-based one that’s orders of magnitude stronger. We’ve built and delivered several mobile/backend products for companies and police forces. We’ve developed our own product on BlackBerry and wrapped infrastructure and ops/support services around it. (Sometimes the consulting work comes back around. If you deliver well with a product that’s wrapped in a service, then customers might ask you to perform bespoke R&D projects for them for speed – we have a small number of these projects at the moment. They may also ask you to wrap your service around other third-party products.) We’ve grown that talented team.

We want Mobbu to provide the best real-time, security-accredited mobile software products and services to the security market. The aim is building something of national importance, something that matters to our customers and particularly the effectiveness and safety of their people, something that we can tell our (security-cleared, ha ha) grand-children about. There’s lots of work to do: building products, delivering support services, doing deals, growing the team, constantly improving.

Doing this is never easy, and we’re very fortunate to have a brilliant team of development, testing, ops, training, account management, sales and finance people, and without whose skill, effort and passion we’ll fail. It’s a privilege to work with Jez, Mark, Emma, Rob, Matt, Adam, Áine, Tom, Will, Stace, Tyra, Dawn, Brad and Alex on this.

Thanks to our friends at RIM as part of our Select Alliance membership, we get sent the latest pre-release BlackBerry’s to test our Police mobile applications on.

This is normally difficult for us because our Police applications can only run on CESG accredited device operating systems. Something that takes RIM 6-12 months to achieve. So testing on latest devices as soon as they are available is not a high priority for us.

Instead I have been using the BlackBerry Bold 9900 as my personal device and here are a few things I have observed:

Touchscreen and tactile keyboard
At first this seemed like a good feature – having the best of both worlds. It turns out if you (like me) are a big fan of the BlackBerry keyboard (and this is their best yet!) you will stop using the touchscreen in favour of the trackpad and keyboard. Touchscreen has become a redundant feature in my view!

That said the Police community will probably see past the redundant touchscreen in favour of the really good keyboard.

Battery life
Battery has been downsized (1500 mAh battery in Bold 9700 2 yrs ago and Bold 9900 has 1250 mAh battery) and I experience about 1 day’s use. If I have Bluetooth and and Wifi on then less than a day! Could be due to it being a demonstration unit and there is a lot of background logging etc RIM do on these demo devices. But I am not the only person who is feeling the pain.

This alone would make it a non-starter as a Police device!

Navigation panel
While I have to vouch for the great trackpad (lights up at night!) on the navigation panel. The navigation panel itself between touchscreen and keyboard can cause problems. Firstly it feels like it is part of the touchscreen and so feels like it should (but its not) be touch sensitive. Also single-handed use (something many BlackBerry users have always vouched for) of the touchpad can cause problems if you accidentally hit the touchscreen while trying to scroll on the trackpad.

This is something that I imagine would be an annoyance for Police with big thumbs and gloves!

Tech
Impressive and powerful processor and HD video camera/camera, which I have used extensively for filming the kids doing funny things. Which is where the 8GB on-board memory comes in handy. Still not sure what I am supposed to do with the NFC chip though!

Our police (surveillance) community would find the high res camera/video useful in the field. And because our customers are not allowed to store images on an SD card the 8GM on-board memory would be very useful.

Overall
I would start off by saying that if the battery life issues I have experienced are real then it is not a device we would suggest our Police customers consider. It is also their high end device in terms of price so that would also affect Police buying decisions.

On the other hand the device has a great look and feel and more importantly very high build quality. This together with the keyboard and technical specifications are the reason (and the waiting for the iPhone4S to be released ) why I have stuck with it longer than intended.

I would go one step further and say that (battery life issues aside) it is probably the best device RIM have built. And the great keyboard really makes me nervous about moving to a touchscreen only device. That said I also feel touchscreen is a waste on a device with a tactile keyboard. it should be one or the other in terms of touchscreen and tactile keyboard. Which I guess means I now need to review the BlackBerry Torch!

The Ministry of Justice awarded new contracts for prisoner escorting in England and Wales in March 2011, and as of late August GEOAmey are the newest entrant and largest player in that market – they’ll be managing approximately 2,600 daily prisoner movements.

Like the previous rounds of private-sector-delivered escorting, this round of PECS contracts in England and Wales is for seven years with options to extend for three. The contracts are to manage around 1,200 locations in England and Wales, including 760 police stations, 147 prisons, 420 Magistrates’ Courts, 112 Crown Courts, the Appeal Court, 13 Tribunals, and up to 222 County Courts – and around 955,000 prisoner movements annually between those locations. The MoJ expects the new contracts to save £250m (20%) over the initial 7-year period.

So how did the contracted vendors in prisoner escorting do?

There’s plenty of raw data for the 2011-18 contract but we’ll attempt a comparison of the last two contract periods by showing prisoner journeys and revenue rather than a direct geographic comparison because escort regions have changed between 2004 and 2011:

Each region had four bidders, except the Northwest/West Midlands/Wales region which had three. The eight award criteria (IV.2.1) measured the bidders across the custodial, logistic and standards spectrum. GEOAmey are the obvious big winner, Serco held ground, while G4S and particularly Reliance lost out⁷. The cost per prisoner journey has dropped in real terms. Hopefully job losses were minimised – I’d guess most employees transferred to new employers under the TUPE legislation.

The contract’s underway. GEOAmey’s partners have delivered, and a few teething troubles were always to be expected.

Ave atque vale⁸

G4S were one of our first clients: in 2004, we built them a web system called PACS to do the custody management at courts. We then added a mobile system called PACS Mobile to track the journeys between prisons and courts on 350+ BlackBerrys. Since then the system has been used by 2,000 G4S vehicle, court, management and compliance staff to manage about 2,000 prisoner journeys daily at 170 courts and 19 vehicle bases across the UK.

But G4S’s transition from England to Scotland in August marks the end of an era for Mobbu: the new PECS contracts introduced new business needs (new geographic areas and inter-prison transfer, at-court efficiencies) and no doubt compliance requirements that the IT systems must meet. G4S’s Scottish contract will have different requirements. We’ve shifted focus to the police market, and GEOAmey are bringing their in-house systems to the contract. And the best of luck to them.

I’m sure it’s considered poor PR practice to draw attention to the loss of a customer, but we’re very proud that our system worked solidly and did its job well. It ran for seven years and handled about 3.1 million prisoner journeys. PACS Mobile is a beloved ancestor of our police product, MFO, but has reached the natural end of its life.

To PACS and PACS Mobile and the people at G4S and Mobbu who ran you, hail and farewell.

.

Footnotes:

¹ Financial numbers are annual and for the eventual 7-year period – NOMS didn’t exercise its option to extend the contracts.

² Financial numbers are annual and for the initial 7-year period. With contract extensions, the totals would jump c 30%.

³ Estimated: 420,000 prisoner journeys annually less approx 180,000 from their Scottish contract = estimated 240,000 journeys

⁴ Estimated: 2011-18 contract is £852.5m, and an approx 20% saving on the previous 2004-11 contract. 2004-11 is therefore implied at approx £1023m. Subtract the GEOAmey revenue figures above = estimated £226m.

⁵ Estimated: 955,000 prisoner journeys annually less GEOAmey’s 670,000 = 285,000 prisoner journeys annually for Serco.

⁶ Estimated: £852.5m over seven years = £121.8m annually. But vendors own estimates sum to £132m annually, so we’ve put the range in.

⁷ G4S have made gains elsewhere: they won Scotland from Reliance – approx 180,000 prisoner journeys prisoner journeys annually, worth £24m/year – nb Scottish prisoner custody is contracted by the Scottish Government rather than the Ministry of Justice so I’ve excluded it from the table above.

⁸ atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē – and for eternity, brother, hail and farewell – as Catullus saluted his dead brother.

Detail emerges on the National Crime Agency from the Home Office announcements, the NCA plan and commentary elsewhere.

The problem statement is summarised in paras 1.2, 1.3 and 2 of the NCA plan: “the national response to serious and organised crime remains patchy [...] absence of a cross-government organised crime strategy, the lack of strong national tasking and coordination, [...] tendency to operate in silos”, and the NCA aims to address that.

What will the NCA do?

The NCA will conduct (run) cross-agency operations:

the NCA will work with police and crime commissioners, chief constables, devolved administrations and others, genuinely connecting activity from the local to the international – in country, at the border and overseas

The head of the NCA will be a senior chief constable or, as the Telegraph puts it, the most senior police officer in Britain with powers to order other chief constables to undertake investigations. The NCA plan is a little more nuanced:

[From the NCA plan] 1.6 [...] The NCA will have the authority to undertake tasking and coordination of the police and other law enforcement agencies to ensure networks of organised criminals are disrupted and prevented from operating. The tasking and coordination function entails the NCA setting the overall operational agenda for tackling serious and organised criminality; ensuring that appropriate action is taken against criminals at the right level led by the right law enforcement agency; stepping in to directly task where there are disputes about the nature of approach or ownership; and where appropriate, tasking or providing its own resources in support.

It will develop a core intelligence, analysis and prioritisation capability, and will have four commands:

The agency will answer to the Home Secretary and will be made up of four distinct crime teams – Organised Crime, Border Policing, Economic Crime and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. It will employ investigators, enforcement officers, intelligence analysts and technical, financial and operational specialists.

So CEOP retains some autonomy as a command. SOCA and NPIA get absorbed and the government will legislate in 2012 to formally disband those organisations. Some of UK Border Agency role moves to the NCA. The Serious Fraud Office has been left outside of the NCA for now, co-ordination to happen in committee with NCA’s Economic Crime Command. Counter-terrorism remains outside NCA, with national asset dumps led by Met Police’s CTC. Para 1.5 of the NCA plan talks about “mirroring” the structure of CT policing – perhaps this is a hint that NCA will eventually encompass CT after 2013. RoCUs and other units that cover level 2 and 3 crime remain in their force-funded regional structures.

The Road to NCA

A shadow NCA, with an appointed Chief Constable and a crime coordination function, will be set up before April 2012, with full transition by the end of 2013 (see the Home Office Structural Reform Plan). From the NCA plan:

7.2 The NCA build will learn the lessons from other machinery of government changes. With the objectives of minimising disruption and securing the best value for money, the NCA will seek to use or adapt existing systems rather than designing new ones. Any procurement proposals for the NCA will be subject to very close scrutiny and challenge and will only proceed where they are clearly essential and unavoidable. The NCA will inherit a range of systems and assets from its precursor agencies, including the SOCA 2010 ICT renewal programme. [...]

7.7 The total cost of the organisation will not exceed the aggregate of the Spending Review settlement for the precursors and the costs of the fully funded functions it is agreed should migrate into the NCA. Transition and running costs will be kept to the absolute minimum necessary to enable the new agency to function; the transition programme will be managed with a rigorous focus on achieving best value.

“NCA will seek to use or adapt existing systems rather than designing new ones” is encouraging, and this procurement strategy should be good news for current vendors to SOCA, NPIA and crime policing functions, though some of the precursor organisations were somewhat budget-constrained.

Policy Exchange’s Blair Gibbs suggests that a national body with teeth and accountability is a natural corollary of the decentralisation of local policing when Crime Commissioners arrive, and concludes:

With a wider remit and more powers, the NCA should avoid the fate of its predecessor agency, but to succeed it will still need to attract high-calibre recruits, earn the respect of specialist officers in local forces, and avoid the competitive animosity that characterises the relationship between the FBI and local law enforcement in the United States. If the NCA can do that, then it will finally resolve the national/local paradox that has beset British policing for years and begin to make the lives of organized criminals a lot more unpleasant.

More:

• the National Crime Agency plan
• the debate in Parliament, 8 June 2011

Paul McKeever and Ian Rennie, for the Police Federation (pdf file):

We currently have the ‘perfect storm’ in policing resulting from Winsor’s attack on pay and conditions, Neyroud’s proposals on promotion and leadership, and Lord Hutton’s proposals on pensions. Policing and Crime Commissioners will potentially change the political dynamics in the Service and there is a move to remove police officers from the protection of health and safety legislation. Police officers are rightly demoralised by this full-on attack on their pay and working conditions. Experienced officers are leaving, or being required to leave the service, in unprecedented numbers and those that remain will be shouldering an ever-increasing burden of public expectation as crime increases. [...]

Sir Hugh, the Police Federation is looking to ACPO to defend the UK Police Service. It is the envy of the world, but is in danger of being destroyed by what appears to be, in part, no more than political ideology. Our conference has sent a clear message that officers currently have no confidence in ACPO, as an organisation, acting in the best interests of British Policing. We urge you to work with us, challenge the government where necessary, and to modernise the Service but not at the expense of the Office of Constable and the communities they serve. The officers working throughout the Police Service in England and Wales are deserving of greater support from their leaders.

Orde for ACPO (pdf file), and signed by many of the ACPO top brass:

I can say with absolute certainty that every chief officer team is working tirelessly within their force, bearing in mind the very difficult financial situation we are presented with, to cut budgets while preserving the critical service we deliver to the public. The reality is that this is extremely challenging: and a number of forces have had to take drastic action to balance budgets. We must be entirely clear about this with our public, with government and with all those who work within the service. Each force is impacted in different ways and many chiefs have articulated this both in public and in private. Without question, the service overall will suffer and reduce. As chief officers our job is to lead policing through these difficult times, remaining focussed on keeping communities safe from harm. [...]

The Winsor, Neyroud and Hutton recommendations are all subject to consultation and we are determined that the outcomes of these processes should recognise and reward officers fairly for the difficult, dangerous and critical job that they do. I feel we can best do this by recognising our different roles but more importantly reinforcing our desire to serve our communities.