PM hints at legislation stick to force blue-light services to share IT

Why is it that...

... elected politicians fall into the trap of believing that a win at the ballot box confers on them knowledge, understanding, and wisdom on each and every subject under the sun? In the case of IT there is more than enough evidence that grandiose plans for big systems always end in tears and a humungous bill for the taxpayer... along with a system that doesn't do what it was specified to do.

Apart from anything else what each of the blue - light services needs to do with its IT systems is not the same as the others, whatever Mike Penning may think; "It simply doesn’t make sense for emergency services to have different premises, different back offices and different IT systems when their work is so closely related and they often share the same boundaries." Since when did the fire or ambulance services need custody suites and rooms for recorded interviews to evidential standards; other contradictions also apply.

Of course he has "previous", being the name most closely associated with the idea of providing blue - light communications on 5G cellular systems.

That thudding noise in the background is people who know this is a bad idea banging their heads on their desks; mine would be among them were it not for being retired. As a taxpayer it still hurts.

"You will have the local autonomy that we give you." ... yeh, sounds about right.

There is merit in this. There should be a max of 8 data centers across the UK for infrastructure. That would be more than enough to provide a service that.

The forces telephoney requirements could be migrated to a cloud service set by them or delivered as a service.

HR and payroll could be centralised.

All this could be done and would have no effect on operational Policing. This would more than likely return monies back to front line.

But we all know it won't happen.

Oh no it won't...

"All this could be done and would have no effect on operational Policing. This would more than likely return monies back to front line."

It would return nothing until all the costs associated with setting it up had been amortised; of course any additional non - personnel related costs would have to be covered as well.

From where, exactly, do cost savings come? Unless existing HR (and other) departments are grossly overstaffed (which may or may not be the case) any new super - system will need the same number of people operating it, less perhaps a few managers.

In addition although basic HR functions may be common to all services the different services do have different things to record about their employees, so either any individual record would have a load of blank fields not relevant to the function or different services would have completely different sections of an overall software package, which would mean a potentially underused system.

The plan to reduce the number of Fire Control Centres went horribly wrong at tremendous expense, and the amalgamation of Police Forces in Scotland has not been without its problems. Reducing the number of Police Control Rooms is not without its risks (OK that isn't a back office function) as local knowledge vanishes; I have tried to report a couple of minor problems to my local force and their mapping system was unable to even vaguely identify locations by road number.

"More IT" is not always by definition an improvement.

Non-political translation:

"We're attempting to feed our corporate partners more money and you're screwing it up! So were going to force you!"

Ambulance crews have enough problem with low intel people as it is, if the plod and amb have shared IT things will get even worse.