UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Public Sector 

Regulator says NCA's aging tech drags down productivity, forces officers to juggle hardware and do manual workarounds

Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) has been told to urgently overhaul an IT estate so dysfunctional that officers say they are fighting serious organized crime despite the technology rather than because of it.

A new report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) has delivered a bruising verdict on the National Crime Agency's tech, concluding that the systems underpinning Britain's fight against organized crime are no longer up to the job.

The criticism lands despite inspectors otherwise finding much to like. The NCA was graded "Good" in several operational areas, including tackling serious and organized crime and working with partners. But throughout the report, inspectors repeatedly return to technology as a fundamental weakness running through the entire organization.

"The NCA's IT infrastructure isn't fit for purpose," the report states. Inspectors backed that assessment with a long list of examples, from officers manually re-entering data and sharing information by hand to teams relying on spreadsheets and other workarounds due to a lack of confidence in official systems.

According to the report, around 70 percent of critical IT incidents each month are linked to that technical debt, the result of years spent prioritizing short-term fixes over long-term modernization.

Officers told inspectors they did not trust the agency's systems, while others described technology as a major drag on productivity. One interviewee summed up the mood: "IT is a blocker; we achieve in spite of it."

Another was even less flattering. "When I started in policing 15 to 20 years ago, I had better technology than I do in the NCA."

The report paints a picture familiar to anyone who has worked in a large public sector IT environment. Officers told inspectors they routinely enter the same information multiple times, rely on manual processes, and manually transfer data to external partners. Some said the agency lacks even a basic personnel directory, making it difficult to find the right colleague when they need help.

While the NCA operates a corporate system called ATLAS CM, inspectors heard that officers are using as many as 50 different case management methods across the agency, including spreadsheets and other manual workarounds, often due to a lack of confidence in the official platform.

The agency's security architecture has also produced its own headaches. Because data sits across multiple government security classifications, many officers reportedly require at least two laptops to do their jobs. Inspectors spoke to some staff who were using four separate machines and said they witnessed the resulting inefficiencies firsthand.

In a separate HMICFRS inspection published last year, inspectors found the agency was still relying on around 260 legacy IT systems more than a decade after beginning a project to modernize IT, with technical debt consuming roughly 80 percent of entire IT budget.

These ongoing IT problems appear to be taking a toll on morale as well. In the NCA's 2024 staff survey, only 33 percent of respondents said they had the tools needed to do their job effectively.

Inspectors concluded the problems are not solely the NCA's responsibility. They also pointed the finger at the Home Office, arguing that short-term funding cycles and a lack of coordinated investment have slowed modernization efforts.

HMICFRS has given the NCA and Home Office until September 30 to explain how they intend to dig the agency out of its technology hole, complete with timelines, funding requirements, and a plan to retire aging systems.

Criminals may have embraced ransomware, encrypted communications, and industrial-scale cybercrime. But according to inspectors, the NCA is still trying to get some of its own systems to talk to each other. ®