Please note: we are not a Data Controller for the Police National Database and cannot respond to Subject Access Requests relating to data held in the PND. Please do not make such requests to us and, in particular, please do not send us sensitive personal information.
An Ambitious National Programme
The Police National Database (PND) is currently available to all UK police forces and selected law enforcement agencies. It allows these organisations to share nationally intelligence and other information captured in local systems. Developed in response to recommendations made in the Bichard inquiry (after the Soham murders in 2002 of two 10 year old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman), the PND now supports delivery of three strategic benefits:
- Safeguarding children and vulnerable people
- Countering terrorism
- Preventing and disrupting serious and organised crime
In 2007, Logica (now CGI) was awarded a £75M contract to build and deliver the PND system to the Home office. Datalynx was subsequently selected by the Home Office to assist all UK police forces to provide data to the PND, and to provide ongoing support to the forces.
A Large and Challenging Programme
Datalynx tackled this challenging project with a structured and focussed approach which involved the following steps:
- Development of a data migration strategy in collaboration with the Home Office, police forces and agencies as data providers and CGI as the supplier of the PND system.
- Design of the PND interfaces and development of the schema definition to enable data in a consistent format to be supplied from over two hundred source systems into a single repository.
- Development and implementation of data quality and data ingest rules.
- Development of the Force Action Plan – a planning and tracking tool to assist forces to implement effective data interfaces.
- Support of 53 data providers comprising police forces and law enforcement agencies in order to create synchronising interfaces. Provision of data from over two hundred operational systems into the PND and delivery of artefacts to Home Office stakeholders.
Datalynx provided the project management coordination and support to ensure the data migration project was delivered on time and within budget.
Automated Sharing of Intelligence across a Significant User-base
The resulting system is now available for police forces and law enforcement agencies to share intelligence efficiently across the UK. Implementation of an automated data provision solution (LynxPND) has saved time and effort that would otherwise have been spent transferring data manually. Additionally, with effective data management functionality, the information supplied to the PND is streamlined and reliable. The PND system now handles more than 1.5 billion records and twenty million images. Furthermore, the system has the capacity to serve 12,000 users. Subsequent to their initial engagement on PND, Datalynx has continued to provide support services for a further ten years. Looking ahead, the company is now providing subject matter expertise to the National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP), which will deliver the next generation of integrated law enforcement data services.
