According to TheRegister.com, police forces in England and Wales spend a staggering 97% of their £2 billion annual technology budget just maintaining old systems. The National Audit Office found that fragmented funding and stop-start investment have left police struggling to adopt new technologies. While the Treasury provided £234 million over four years for innovation, that funding stream got cut starting 2025-26. Basically, police tech modernization is hitting wall after wall.
Where this is heading
Here’s the thing: when you’re spending almost every penny on keeping the lights on, you can’t actually move forward. We’re talking about police forces that can’t properly invest in things like live facial recognition, knife detection tech, or even basic cloud migration. The Police National Database transformation? Delayed by over a year because they’re stuck on ancient Oracle systems.
And it’s not just about shiny new gadgets. This maintenance trap creates a vicious cycle. You can’t attract skilled digital workers when they’re going to spend their careers babysitting legacy systems. You can’t implement AI or automation when your data quality is poor and your infrastructure is crumbling. So productivity improvements that other sectors take for granted? Police just can’t get there.
What happens when emergency services tech debt becomes this severe? We’re already seeing the consequences – the PND was rated a “Red” risk by the government’s own watchdog. That’s not just bureaucratic language – that means real operational risks. Officers working with outdated tools, slower response times, missed connections in criminal intelligence.
The Treasury pulling funding from 2025-26 basically guarantees this situation will get worse before it gets better. Police leaders acknowledge they lack a single “voice” on technology priorities, and without consistent funding, every force ends up making different, fragmented decisions. It’s a perfect storm of financial constraints, legacy baggage, and now withdrawn support.
Look, we keep hearing about the potential of AI and new tech to transform policing. But as the NAO report shows, that potential remains just that – potential. Until someone figures out how to break the maintenance cycle, police tech will remain stuck in the past while criminals move to the future.
