The Home Office - PNC Service Continuity Contingency

The Home Office on behalf of the National Police Chief’s Council, acting through the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) programme, is reviewing a potential contingency option for a possible future procurement to ensure the service continuity of the Police National Computer (PNC).

You will be familiar with the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) programme that the Home Office is progressing. This is a complex transformation programme and is designed to create a modern data service and to enable the eventual retirement of the Police National Computer (PNC) that has been running since 1974.

We continue to make solid progress in LEDS and remain confident, based on the current trajectory, that LEDS will deliver parity with the PNC within the timescales required to enable to the PNC to be decommissioned as scheduled.

It was confirmed to the Public Account Committee (PAC) that the programme is confident that it will not have to use this ultimate fallback mitigation (contingency) option. The progression of a contingency option is operationally and commercially prudent to ensure the continued provision of a key piece of critical national infrastructure. By not undertaking this engagement, we would fail in our due diligence, and it would be remiss of us not to have a contingency option for the continued service continuity of PNC if the LEDS trajectory were to change and we needed to execute on this option. It is important to note, whilst the PNC remains fully supported until March 2026, and LEDS is designed and remains on track to enable the PNC to be switched off and to be replaced, we do wish to progress with and explore the viability of a contingency option.

It was requested by the PAC that the Home Office should set out for their review, how it will guarantee that police and the law enforcement agencies will be able to access the PNC service until LEDS is ready.

We respect and acknowledge that this may not appear attractive as an opportunity. Through early market engagement, we are keen to understand this and to take the time and effort to properly engage so we can fully understand what the challenges are for suppliers to potentially bid for this opportunity.

A key ambition of this market engagement is to test the appetite, market capacity, capability, experience, and maturity to provide re-platforming and migration services for the PNC, from a legacy mainframe environment, whilst maintaining the security, integrity and minimising any operational (Policing and Law Enforcement Agency) impact to the PNC. At the same time, we would wish to understand the potential routes to market i.e., which Crown Commercial Services (CCS) Framework Agreements would be appropriate if we progressed through to a Further Competition.

Following this Market Briefing, the Home Office will then share details for a review of technical documents through a secure virtual data room (via Huddle). Document downloads will not be permitted. The exception to this will be a Request for Information document (RFI) that will be available for updating within Huddle.

Through this RFI process, the Home Office will be looking to obtain some relevant and specific market data to help further inform the finalisation of its technical requirements and commercial strategy. The timescales will be included within the RFI documentation. To set early expectations we would be looking for a response to the RFI within 10 days of this initial Market Briefing.

This exercise is designed to provide a platform for the Home Office to brief suppliers on the opportunity and invite any initial feedback to help establish the most attractive way of packaging and scoping a possible future procurement of a potential contingency option for ensuring the service continuity of PNC.