Home Secretary Amber Rudd is to make £26m available over the next 3 years to 28 policing projects in a bid to “help transform the service for the future”.
The funding will be granted through a Police-led bidding process, and includes projects such as a two-year £5.9m to create to a joint forensics and biometrics programme, led by Dorset Police, £2m to scope and design the delivery of a national policing data analytics lab that will transform the way forces collate and use data, and £1m, to be spread over three years, for Nottinghamshire Police to set up a national business crime reduction hub that will address business crime in a more consistent way across the UK.
The projects also include £2.3m to support a series of bids developed by the Police ICT Company and the Police Technology Council for the Police Reform and Transformation Board that will benefit all UK Forces once implemented.
This will include, says the Home Office, cloud services to access local, regional and national information as part of a way to deliver “a more efficient and effective service” to citizens.
“The Police Transformation Fund is a real opportunity for police leaders and Police and crime commissioners to transform policing for the future, and to respond to the changing nature of crime,” said the Home Secretary.
“It is my pleasure to award funds to a raft of projects today, from cutting-edge approaches to reducing crime through to digital projects that will help promote diversity in policing.”
Set up as part of the spending review in 2015, the Police Transformation Fund is designed to allocate extra investment to continue the job of reform and shape policing for the future.
Police and crime commissioners and chief constable representatives sit on the board alongside senior leaders in policing, with the final decisions on bids made by the Home Secretary.
The £26m complements £40m already awarded to projects this year.
Read the full list of approved Fund projects here.
