Lucrative police IT deal up for grabs

Deal forms part of government commitment to better share data

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is on the hunt for suppliers to develop a new IT system in line with the government's aims to better share data in the justice system.

The new Criminal Justice Data Sharing (CJDS) system is designed to be flexible and cost effective, and falls in line with the PSNI's strategic goals for digital services. The CJDS contract will see suppliers provide the Northern Irish body with software, database systems, IT storage, IT services, data services and document-management services.

At the end of last year, central government outlined plans to make it easier to share data across the criminal justice system.

"Data is at the heart of the criminal justice system. Information is captured at different points by a variety of agencies who use it to help make important and informed decisions," said Kit Collingwood, deputy director of the Ministry of Justice, at the time.

"But there is a problem. At the moment, all this important data is held in large, disparate systems owned by different agencies such as police forces, prosecutors, courts, prisons and probation services. This makes it hard to share, and means staff may not have all the information when they need it.

"These systems are expensive to maintain, hard to upgrade and more and more out of step with what users need and expect. Staff often have to manually re-enter data or phone colleagues in other organisations to get important information."

The Northern Irish contract will be worth between £7m and £15m over an initial six-year period, with options to extend it by up to five years.

"Delivery on this commitment to the community relies on a close working relationship with criminal justice organisations in Northern Ireland and across the wider UK," the contract notice said. "The close relationship between criminal justice organisations is critical to PSNI and is partly delivered through a data sharing system."