The IMPACT Programme, a key element of our work to deliver Sir Michael Bichard's recommendations following the murders in Soham, has already delivered some significant benefits to the police service, most notably the IMPACT Nominal Index (INI). For the longer-term, we have a very clear vision of what the programme is planning to deliver.

The programme is now in a strong position to deliver a range of capabilities to the Police Service which will not only meet Sir Michael's recommendations but will transform the service's ability to protect the communities it serves.

IMPACT will deliver a programme of technology-enabled business change for the police service which will:

discharge our commitment to implementing the relevant recommendations in Sir Michael Richard's report following the Soham murders; enable the delivery of improvements in police performance, producing substantial benefits through increasing numbers of crimes prevented and detected, and by bringing more offenders to justice; increase police operational efficiency, driving out considerable savings annually in direct benefits; and deliver a replacement for the Police National Computer (PNC).

The delivery of the IMPACT Nominal Index (INI) in December 2005 responded to the second of Sir Michael Bichard's recommendations: police officers can now establish whether any other force in England and Wales may have information on individuals of interest to them. However, the system does not give direct access to the records themselves and the next stage is to develop a national information sharing infrastructure which will make operational information visible to forces across the country, transcending force and system boundaries.

The work will build upon the achievements already delivered by the programme, providing a modular and incremental approach comprising the following stages:

The continued deployment of the INI to forces in England and Wales during 2006, initially expanding within Child Abuse Investigation Units then into other selected business areas including some non-Home Office forces and central agencies. This will be accompanied by some limited further development, to improve its functionality; during 2006, the continued development within police forces of the capability to extract data from their local force databases in a common format (The Cross Regional Information Sharing Project—CRISP—Data Schema), enabling the data to be shared with other forces and partner agencies through data warehouses.

Completion of the development of the CRISP software, as the basis for:

Deploying to each force in England and Wales from the middle of 2007, an interim data warehousing capability which will enable information from systems serving their eight main operational business areas to be retrieved by a single query; leading to:

A national data sharing capability (A Police National Database) available to all forces in England and Wales and delivering the full benefits described above by early 2010.

Officers will be able to search for information on specific people, objects, locations and events to inform operational decision-making, or to use the national data as a resource for producing intelligence products prescribed by the National Intelligence Model (NIM). The programme will also link the information contained on the current PNC, and other national systems, to force-level information.

Business processes will be optimised through an associated programme of business change based upon the NIM; the code of practice and associated Guidance on the Management of Police Information (MoPI); and procedures developed within the programme.

This programme of work will be delivered using a managed service based on existing and planned Criminal Justice System (CIS) Exchange shared services developed by Criminal Justice IT (CJIT). This offers the potential to exploit the new technology being piloted by CJIT and to re-use existing CJS Exchange components.

The use of the CJS Exchange will provide other Criminal Justice organisations with continued access to PNC data, and the delivery channels to populate the central system with data from outside the police service. The IMPACT programme will continue to retain responsibility for delivering the programme with a strong business lead and a sharp focus on driving out the benefits.

In order to realise the potential benefits from the programme, it will be managed alongside other related developments:

the programme to create strategic forces, including by force amalgamations, to improve the police service's capacity to deliver level 2 protective services; the framework of police performance measures managed by the Home Office, which incentivise Chief Officers to give the appropriate measure of priority to tackling level 2 crime; the ACPO level 2 crime programme, which aims to enhance the police operational capability at the supra-force level; and will support the following key stakeholders:

Chief Officers directly, by demonstrating the extent to which they can reduce the risk to the reputation of their forces by exploiting the opportunities offered by the IMPACT solutions;

Police Authorities, by demonstrating the savings and efficiency gains in prospect;

HMIC, by supporting and strengthening monitoring and compliance measures developed by the programme.

While the police national database is under development, resources have been allocated to enable the police IT organisation to update the hardware platform of the PNC. This will ensure that the PNC remains fit for purpose until the police national database is fully in service.