U.K. Home Office Will Set Up Company to Manage Police Computers

The U.K. Home Office will set up a company to manage the different computer systems of the country’s police forces, in an effort to save officers time and the government money.

“The way we do things now is confused, fragmented and expensive,” Home Secretary Theresa May said in a speech to senior police officers today in Harrogate, northern England. “We know, for example, that one supplier now has over 1,500 contracts across all the forces. This would simply never happen in the commercial world. Across the police service there are around 5,000 staff, working on over 2,000 ICT systems, across 100 data centers.”

Police spending on computer systems is 1.2 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) a year, May said. She said the new company, to be set up in the first half of 2012, will be owned by the police, and the government and private companies may also take stakes.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net.