Member

The Government intend to create a power for the national police service to mandate data standards to drive consistency in how data is recorded, managed and used across policing. This will ensure that information sharing is applied uniformly across England and Wales and will also improve national data integration and data sharing by establishing a national data integration and exploitation service to link key policing datasets and enable secure, timely sharing between police forces and back with central government. We also expect that this will become a central point of access for external agencies that need to access key policing data. In parallel, a new programme of work is being established to improve data flows across the criminal justice system, including between policing and probation. Taken together, these, I contend, are important advances. Legislating for a statutory plan risks creating duplication and slowing the work already in motion by introducing additional and disproportionate reporting requirements. What matters is delivery of change on the ground, rather than generating additional reporting duties or parallel planning processes.