Lincolnshire Police Authority (LPA) has shortlisted partners Steria and Reliance, and security firm G4S as the two remaining bidders in a landmark IT and BPO deal across the police force that could be worth £200m over the next ten years. The Capita Blue Light Alliance, Serco & Logica, and Northgate Information Solutions failed to progress to the next stage. The broad range of services being considered includes HR, finance, IT, legal services, estate and fleet management, strategic development and project management, general and specialist administrative support, criminal justice support and custody provision and control room services. LPA will then seek to use this as a shared service with other forces.
LPA, like all other police forces in England, is facing swingeing budget cuts – here to the tune of £20m over the next four years. This is driving police forces to seek help from SITS suppliers to assist them in developing collaborative arrangements with other police forces or with their local council, or to improve their IT and business processes. Unsurprisingly therefore the police sector is a hot bed of activity right now. And it has driven Capita in particular to make a string of recent police sector acquisitions such as Sungard Public Sector and Beat Systems to gain a foothold in the market (see Capita: H1 revenue falls short). No doubt then LPA’s decision will be a real disappointment to Capita.
Lincolnshire will be the second English police force to outsource its IT and back office services, following Cleveland Police Authority (CPA), which signed a major £200m+ deal with Steria last July (see here). I wrote extensively on this for BusinessProcessViews when assessing Steria's platform based shared services strategy.
There’s no doubt this is an ambitious programme, and the speed of the procurement is almost unprecedented in the public sector for a deal of this size and complexity. From the start of the process in March to identify partners, LPA hopes to sign off on the eventual deal by November – so a total of eight months from start to finish. This speedy approach is clearly not without risk, but if achieved successfully it will prove to other forces, and indeed the rest of the public sector that major IT/BPO deals can be procured in relatively short time with the right buy in and impetus driven from the top.
Steria should now be in pole position for the contract. Certainly its experience at CPA will be invaluable in the procurement process, as will be its experience in shared services at both CPA and the NHS. We are also pleased to see its use of partnering with Reliance to offer additional services such as facilities and estates management, although we see that Reliance also has experience in other activities such as taking DNA samples and fingerprints, and managing electronic ID parades, interpreters, bail management and forensic medical examinations. G4S meanwhile seems a less likely candidate. With experience in ‘offender management, rehabilitation and transportation through to courtroom security and outsourced police services’ we don’t see it having the transformational change capability or IT and business process re-engineering services that will required of a programme like this.