According to TheRegister.com, police forces in England and Wales are spending a staggering 97% of their £2 billion annual technology budget just maintaining legacy systems. The National Audit Office found that fragmented investment and the Treasury cutting funding streams from 2025-26 have left new tech projects in limbo. Projects like live facial recognition and knife detection technology are seeing reduced or eliminated funding. Basically, the police tech budget is stuck in a vicious cycle where maintaining old systems eats up almost all available resources.
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Where does this leave policing?
Here’s the thing: when 97% of your budget goes to keeping the lights on, you’re not innovating—you’re surviving. And that’s exactly where UK policing finds itself. The Treasury pulled the plug on that £234 million four-year funding package, which means all those shiny AI and automation projects just hit a brick wall.
But wait, it gets worse. The Police National Database transformation—you know, the system that actually helps solve crimes—is rated “Red” risk because they can’t migrate off ancient Oracle platforms. They’ve been trying to move to the cloud for over a year with no success. When your crime intelligence database is failing because of “technological debt,” that’s not just an IT problem—that’s a public safety crisis.
So what happens next? Well, without serious intervention, police tech will keep falling further behind. We’re talking about forces that can’t recruit digital talent because who wants to maintain 20-year-old systems? They’re stuck with poor data quality and no clear strategy because, as the report notes, there’s no single “policing voice” to prioritize technology.
Look, the implications here are massive. Other countries are racing ahead with predictive policing and advanced analytics while UK forces can’t even get their basic databases migrated. How are they supposed to compete with sophisticated criminal networks using outdated tools? The productivity gains everyone keeps promising from AI and automation? They’re not happening anytime soon.
Basically, we’re looking at a system where maintenance costs will only grow as systems get older, creating an even bigger hole to climb out of. Without a coherent national strategy and proper funding, police technology in England and Wales is heading for obsolescence. And that should worry everyone.
