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Technology and digital skills can give police forces more capacity, but buying software alone will not make policing more productive. In England and Wales, gains depend on combining usable systems with better data, redesigned processes, workforce skills and safeguards that protect the quality and fairness of police work.
What police productivity should mean
Police productivity is achieving better public-safety and justice outcomes with the available time, money, people, data and equipment—without weakening legality, fairness, service quality or public trust. It is not simply a count of arrests, recorded crimes, detections, response times, officers or purchased technology.
Efficiency means using fewer resources or less time for a task. Effectiveness means achieving the right outcome. They matter together: a faster process that produces unreliable evidence, unlawful decisions, biased outcomes or more rework is not a genuine productivity improvement. Useful measures can include more time for frontline work, quicker case progression, less duplicate data entry, better evidence review, fewer avoidable transfers, improved victim experience and more consistent service between forces.
The issue is increasingly important because investigations often involve phones, online communications, cloud data, video and large digital evidence sets. Officers must also meet demanding disclosure and information-management requirements. Digital capability therefore affects contact handling, investigations, custody, case preparation, intelligence, workforce planning and communication with the public—not just the IT department.
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What the productivity figures do—and do not—show
The Home Office’s 2023 Policing Productivity Review identified 64 science-and-technology projects and estimated that they were saving about 347,656 workforce hours and £8.2 million in direct net costs annually. These are estimates reported by the review, not independently verified savings across every force. It said wider national adoption could potentially save up to 15 million hours a year, while warning that scaling solutions nationally would be complex.
The government response said full implementation of the review’s 26 recommendations could free around 38 million police hours per year within five years—an equivalent of more than 20,000 officers’ worth of time. That was a projection, not a record of savings already achieved and not a proposal to reduce officer numbers. The later National Audit Office report, published in November 2025, found that limited understanding of what works, poor standardisation and patchy adoption of digital technology continued to obstruct sustainable productivity gains across the 43-force system.
Four layers of digital capability
Baseline digital competence
Most roles need confidence using case-management tools, communicating digitally, entering accurate information and handling it securely. Staff also need to understand data quality, basic evidence and disclosure responsibilities, and common cyber risks such as phishing. If routine systems are confusing or information is entered inconsistently, the resulting errors create extra work downstream.
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Operational data literacy
Frontline officers, investigators, supervisors, analysts and control-room staff need to search systems effectively, assess where information came from and how reliable it is, manage digital evidence and record decisions so they can be audited and disclosed when required. They should be able to use dashboards without treating correlation as proof or an automated recommendation as a decision. The productivity review calls for mainstream training to strengthen information-management and data-literacy capability across the workforce.
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Specialist technical skills
Forces need dedicated expertise in digital forensics, data engineering and science, AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, software development, automation, service design, product management and technology architecture. The review identifies these capabilities as important to keeping pace with policing’s technical demands, while noting that forces compete with commercial employers for scarce specialists. Recruiting a small technical team cannot replace practical digital capability among the wider workforce.
Digital leadership and governance
Chief officers, senior managers, procurement teams and policy leaders need to define the problem before choosing a product, test benefit claims, understand technical and legal risks, challenge suppliers and decide when a project should stop or scale. The National Policing Digital Strategy 2025–2030 describes the goal of developing leaders as “intelligent digital customers” who can guide selection, evaluation, implementation and governance.
Where technology can release useful capacity
Automating repetitive administration
Robotic process automation can transfer or match information between systems, flag errors and handle repetitive vetting or corporate tasks. The intended benefit is less time spent on predictable processing and rekeying. Automation should not simply reproduce a flawed workflow at greater speed; the underlying process and exception handling need review first.
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Tools can assist with indexing evidence, finding duplicates, video and audio processing, transcription support, redaction and case-file preparation. The government response to the review identified automated redaction and preparation of digital evidence among funded applications. These are workload-reduction and decision-support uses: investigators, disclosure officers, prosecutors and courts retain their responsibilities for relevance, accuracy, disclosure and evidential decisions.
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Improving first contact and demand routing
Control-room tools and virtual response models can help triage calls, direct people to an appropriate service, share information with partner agencies and reserve in-person deployments for matters that need police powers or attendance. A tool should be judged by whether it improves routing and service, not merely by whether it reduces dispatches. Vulnerability, repeat harm and the person’s circumstances still require sound judgment.
Using video and remote interviews appropriately
Rapid Video Response can let officers interview victims or witnesses remotely, potentially reducing travel and delay. It is not automatically the better service: some people need face-to-face contact, digital access is unequal, and remote communication can affect rapport and safeguarding. Consent, recording, disclosure and evidential rules still apply.
Making better use of data and national systems
Reliable data can support demand forecasting, resource allocation, repeat-harm identification, missing-person response, investigation prioritisation and workforce planning. National systems such as the Police National Computer and Police National Database also allow access to information beyond a single force. Better interoperability can reduce repeated searches, but depends on accurate records, lawful access, appropriate retention, access controls and audit trails. Duplicate records and false matches need to be handled rather than hidden by an apparently unified view.
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Why adoption remains uneven
Fragmented systems and processes
England and Wales have 43 forces with diverse local systems and practices. The productivity review identifies this structure, legal uncertainty, skills shortages and fragmented implementation as barriers to scaling innovation. A tool that works in one force may not transfer cleanly if data fields, workflows, contracts, governance or staff capability differ elsewhere.
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Legacy technology and migration costs
Older systems may be expensive to maintain, hard to integrate, poorly documented or difficult for frontline users. Replacing them is not cost-free: data conversion, training and migration can temporarily reduce capacity, and new platforms can introduce outages or unfamiliar workflows. A credible business case includes both transition costs and the cost of ongoing support, security and upgrades.
Training and trust
A one-off launch session, training only a few super-users or expecting staff to learn around operational duties rarely builds durable competence. Training should be role-specific, refreshed as processes change and supported by protected learning time and help when systems fail. Adoption also depends on whether staff find a tool accurate, available, relevant, secure and consistent with policy. Parallel spreadsheets, paper notes or duplicate entry are signs that the official workflow may not be trusted or usable.
Limited capacity to implement and evaluate
Forces may lack product managers, business analysts, data engineers, cyber specialists, procurement expertise, change managers and evaluation capability. The College of Policing says its Centre for Police Productivity has mapped more than 900 productivity innovations across UK policing and is assessing which are ready for wider rollout. Mapping ideas is useful, but scale still requires integration, training, governance and evidence that benefits survive outside a pilot.
Responsible technology, including AI
AI may assist with transcription, summarisation, classification or prioritisation, but outputs can omit context, misidentify speakers, misread accents or reproduce bias in historical data. Errors can be difficult to spot when generated at scale. Each use needs a defined purpose, reliable inputs, auditability, human verification and a clear record of review. Accountability for lawful decisions, safeguarding and evidence handling remains with people.
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Data-enabled policing also raises questions of privacy, bias, accuracy, disclosure and public confidence. High-risk uses require a lawful basis and appropriate assessment, restrictions, oversight and routes to review. Public explanation is part of responsible implementation, not an optional communications exercise. The digital strategy itself treats public confidence as essential to police use of data and technology.
How forces can assess and implement a productivity improvement
- Define the bottleneck. Specify the task, delay or handoff that needs improvement. Establish whether the cause is technology, procedure, staffing, data or a combination.
- Set a baseline. Before deployment, record staff time, processing time, errors and rework, backlog, case quality, system availability, user experience and relevant victim or witness outcomes.
- Design with users and affected communities. Involve frontline staff in testing real tasks and consider accessibility, language needs and people who cannot safely or reliably use a digital channel.
- Check integration, security and exit options. Confirm the system can exchange data with existing tools, has appropriate access controls and audit logging, supports resilience, and lets the force export its data if a contract ends.
- Train by role and protect learning time. Provide practical instruction, refreshers, local support and specialist ownership. Account for the short-term capacity cost of training instead of assuming it happens for free.
- Pilot and evaluate independently. Compare results with existing practice and assess quality as well as speed. Include integration, procurement, training and maintenance costs in the net-benefit calculation.
- Scale only when evidence supports it. Monitor errors, unintended consequences and transferability to other forces. Do not treat a successful local trial as proof of national suitability.
- Retire duplicate work and publish lessons. Remove redundant reporting or systems where safe, and share what worked, what did not and the conditions needed for adoption.
Funding and the test of sustainability
The government response referred to more than £65 million in innovation and technology funding for 2024/25 and more than £175 million committed for future years at the time. The Public Accounts Committee later reported a reduction in specified funding intended to support technology rollout from £105 million in 2024–25 to £50 million in 2025–26. These are historical government and parliamentary funding figures, not current budgets for every force or evidence that the money has been spent successfully. A lasting productivity improvement must cover maintenance, upgrades, cyber assurance, training and specialist staff after any initial funding ends.
The strategy for 2025–2030 sets ambitions for workforce capability, interoperability, data quality, responsible AI and stronger measurement; it is not proof that implementation barriers have been resolved. Progress should be visible in measured time and process improvements, better-quality service and evidence that benefits persist across forces—not just in the number of systems purchased or licences issued.
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