A year of the Policing Problem Book: the answers that came from government, and the ones still waiting

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Written by James Johnson, Business Development Executive, Emergency Services

A year ago, at the NPCC Innovation and Digital Summit, policing told us where it hurts the most. The 13 underlying problems that create a multitude of challenges, and where they wanted to focus efforts to research and innovate, were laid out in the Policing Problem Book.

Introduced by Professor Paul Taylor, Chief Scientific Adviser for Policing, and NPCC Chair Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, the book distilled an extensive consultation into these 13 underlying problems:

1. Digital evidence.
2. Public contact.
3. Data sharing between forces.
4. Offender management.
5. Online child sexual exploitation.
6. Public trust.
7. Surveillance technology.
8. Synthetic content and connected devices.
9. Cybercrime.
10. Workforce skills.
11. Officer safety.
12. Mobility.
13. And the ability to innovate, evaluate and scale what works.

The foreword was clear about the intent: policing makes the biggest difference when its efforts focus on “a single set of collectively identified challenges.”

The summit returns on 20 October, this year centred on preparing for the National Police Service and responding to the White Paper. So it’s a fair moment to ask, where are we now? and what has already been answered?

Why a problem book mattered

I spent ten years in UK policing, gaining a broad range of experience. Starting on the busy streets of the Southampton ‘nighttime economy’ (aka the wild west), my career took me through control room roles, firearms teams and protection of our critical national infrastructure.

The perspective I got from working in three different forces during that time, was my first glimpse into this weird reality of the patchwork of different solutions where some of the seams didn’t fully meet.

Then I moved to the supplier side, so I’ve seen the same problems from different angles, and the private / public relationship from both ends. Too often it ran backwards. A supplier arrived with a product, a force went looking for a problem it fitted, and dozens of forces ended up with slightly different answers to the same question.

The Problem Book authors hope to turn that around. Each of the 13 problems comes with the specific questions underneath it, and the intended audience of industry, government and academia, are openly invited to work with policing on solving them.

Industry has turned up

The engagement has been real. techUK formalised a strategic partnership with the NPCC’s Digital, Data and Technology Coordination Committee. On 9 September it ran a Policing Problem Book Impact Day, with member responses to the 13 problem statements shared with the NPCC and the Office of the Police Chief Scientific Adviser ahead of this month’s summit.

Nine days later, the Police Digital Service and the NPCC’s National Technology Board ran an industry workshop billed as problem-led rather than product-led and anchored on the Problem Book. Suppliers were asked for ideas with measurable impact within six to twelve months: lower avoidable technology costs and less operational effort.

The idea is travelling, too. Australia and New Zealand’s policing advisory agency has put a problem book of its own into its 2026-27 plan.

But the most significant answers so far have come from government.

The White Paper proposals answered several problems at once

When the Home Office published From Local to National: A New Model for Policing on 26 January this year, interestingly, a number of its commitments read like replies to the Problem Book:

Digital evidence (Problem 1). Police.AI, the national centre launched in June and hosted by the College of Policing, is piloting AI to triage, summarise and disclose digital evidence in up to ten forces, ahead of national rollout in 2027.
Online child sexual exploitation (Problem 5). Police.AI is developing tools to identify and categorise abuse imagery, reducing how much harmful material staff have to view.
Synthetic content (Problem 8). A new Policing AI Threat Hub will lead the national response to AI-enabled crime, including deep-fake intimate images.
Data sharing (Problem 3). Mandated national data standards and a new National Data Integration and Exploitation Service.
Innovation and evaluation (Problem 13). A national route to test and scale AI tools, with accuracy and bias testing before deployment and a public register of the tools in use.
Procurement (Problem 11). An end to forces buying technology, equipment and uniform in isolation, with £350m of savings projected over three and a half years. I’ll come back to that in December.

That changes how suppliers need to engage. Add a new Chief Digital Information Officer role and a centralised DDaT function, and the route from problem to solution increasingly runs through national bodies, not 43 separate buying decisions.

What the frontline is still waiting for

In May, Policing Insight published the UK Police Digital Experience Survey, supported by the NPCC, Home Office, Police Federation and Police Digital Service. More than 8,000 officers and staff took part. Of officers up to chief inspector, 55% were dissatisfied with their force’s technology, rising to 64% among senior officers.

When I went to the debrief event in London, I heard something that really resonated from my time in policing. Officers and staff were fed up with the sense that technology was being done to them, not with them.

There’s an important lesson here for anyone involved in the buying process of technology on both the supplier and customer sides. If you don’t have the people using your tech, at the table when the problem is first being unpacked and the ideal outcomes described, you’ll end up off target.

Fieldwork ran from September to December 2025, just as the Problem Book landed, so it’s a baseline rather than a verdict on the year. But it shows what success has to look like. The themes were fragmented, ageing systems, poor process design and under-investment, with officers describing time lost re-keying information into systems that don’t talk to each other.

Public contact (Problem 2) shows the pattern. The Problem Book was candid that Single Online Home, now critical national infrastructure, runs on an ageing, complex and increasingly costly stack while demand across 999, 101, email and social media demands as contact channels keeps climbing.

Just think how easily overwhelmed the contact management teams in Hampshire Constabulary would have been without the innovative @Salesforce Agent Bobbi aiding the triage of demand when they found themselves at the centre of a global news cycle.

The national response so far is evolution, not replacement: the Met, which hosts Digital Public Contact for the NPCC, is procuring a single supplier to run and enhance the existing platform and add AI, under a contract due to start in July 2027.

That may well be the right call. But the digital front door is only as good as what sits behind it: the control room, the records system, and the network an officer relies on at 3am.

The Problem Book’s own tagging makes the point. Analytics is listed as a primary service line against nine of the 13 problems; interconnectivity against five. The AI answers are arriving first because they are visible and fundable. Almost all of them depend on data moving reliably between systems that were never designed to connect.

What industry should do in year two

If year one was about turning up, year two has to be about delivery. Four suggestions from my perspective:

Lead with the problem, not the product. If you can’t say which of the 13 problems you’re addressing, and what a force would measurably see in six to twelve months, you’re not ready for the conversation.
Build for the national model. The National Police Service will set mandatory national standards for data and technology. A solution that only works inside one force’s architecture has a shelf life.
Bring evidence, not demos. Problem 13 asks how innovations can withstand legal scrutiny, and PoliceAI is building testing and a public register. Expect evaluation to be the price of entry, and welcome it.
Treat the survey as the user requirement. The real test of whether industry has answered the Problem Book isn’t how many responses were submitted. It’s whether officers report a better experience the next time they’re asked. Make sure they’re at the table

At SCC, we are focused on solutions we are best positioned to help with; helping policing reduce investigative workload through better handling of digital evidence (Problem 1), improve digital public contact (Problem 2), connect data and systems across forces (Problem 3), strengthen cyber resilience (Problem 9), and evaluate and scale innovation responsibly (Problem 13).

Our growing Emergency Services team combines sector and industry experience to connect forces with practical solutions, using eligible funded assessments and clear roadmaps to move from problem statements to implementation.

The question for the summit

Thirteen times, the Problem Book asked how policing could do something better. A year on, I think the question for those of us on the supplier side is simpler: what have we made easier for the person on shift?

techUK are soon to publish a solution book in response to the problem book, having consulted the broad supply chain. I’ll be looking at that with interest.

SCC will be exhibiting at the NPCC Innovation and Digital Summit from 20 October. If you work in a force, which of the 13 problems do you think has moved least this year? My colleagues Chris Jump and Dan Crumbley will be there, delighted to talk to you.