Baroness Doocey (LD)

My Lords, Amendment 432 seeks to press the Government on their plans to address long-standing problems of fragmented police and criminal justice data systems. I must tell noble Lords that I was working on this very subject when I was a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, which I left more than 16 years ago, and the system has neither changed nor got any better. The recent national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation produced by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, described policing’s data intelligence infrastructure as antiquated and identified systemic failures that continue to put children at serious risk. The audit also highlighted the wider paucity of technology underpinning policing. These concerns echo what has been said for many years, and when I served on the Metropolitan Police Authority, the same warnings had already been voiced about creaking systems that did not keep pace with the demands placed on them. Yet despite endless reviews, there is still no fully integrated digital system linking the police with the rest of the criminal justice system. Fragmented, outdated IT undermines public protection more broadly. Officers’ time is wasted on manual workarounds; investigative opportunities are missed; prosecutions are delayed, and known risks are not always identified, let alone shared. As digital evidence proliferates and crime becomes more cross-border and complex, the lack of seamless data sharing between forces and agencies becomes even more damaging. Concerns about poor IT integration between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were being formally raised as far back as the late 1990s. A major joint inspection published in July 2025 reiterated that the CPS case management system was never designed to interface properly with the 43 different police IT systems, contributing to delays, low charge rates and victim frustration. In other words, the same structural problems persist nearly three decades on.