Event round-up: Roundtable with Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security - Innovation in Policing
techUK, in partnership with members PA Consulting, held a roundtable with the Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security and his new role as Cabinet Office National Security Innovation Champion, Paul Killworth, to discuss opportunities and challenges around innovation within policing. The roundtable was second in a series that techUK have held with Paul, who’s role is cross-cutting across the national security community including the United Kingdom Intelligence Community (UKIC), the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and some aspects of counter terror policing.
The role of National Security Innovation Champion was created by two main drivers, one was to deliver the 2021 Integrated Review (IR) commitments, as the document put a lot of emphasis on the need to improve government’s ability to innovate, both in general policy terms but also with a key focus on science and technology. The IR recognised that the UK puts a lot of resources in into primary research and applied research at departmental level, however, pulling those ideas through to genuine impact is often met with barriers. There was therefore a need to understand how the UK can innovate better, faster and more impactfully.
The other half of the need for the role came out of the culture inquiry into national security which dates back three years and was established by the National Security Council (NSC). In summation, it developed a view of the culture which was present across the national security community, police and government. That inquiry came back with a set of findings which pointed out that often the national security community was more hierarchal than other parts of government, drawing from quite carefully selected components of the wider community and primarily, diversity across the board was less than any other part or service of government. In terms of innovation, the findings presented that innovation was therefore weakest within the context of national security.
Within his role so far, Paul has been met with the following overarching themes across the innovation landscape:
- Government is at its best around innovation when it is clear about its priorities; what does it most want to achieve.
- There is a challenge of working across the wire. Many parts of the national security community's default for doing innovation in the past around science and technology has been trying to innovate within TOP SECRET parts of the organisation, which then makes it hard to scale in the modern era. Paul is aware that industry have encouraged the national security community, agencies and departments to find new ways of working across those boundaries with private sector partners.
- There are often difficulties with pull-through; how does the national security community take ideas, develop them with partners and get them into regular business when resources are often tight.
The focus of the roundtable centered around whether the above themes were replicated when looking at innovation within policing and the opportunities and challenges faced in the sector. The attendees discussed both enablers and obstacles which are met when trying to ‘do innovation better’ in policing and some insightful take aways are listed below.
- When exploring some emerging technologies being used by police forces, it is clear that there is a ‘better together’ approach, but in reality, that is not present across all constabularies or agencies. Data is one of the technologies which is ‘better together’, yet there seems to be immense barriers to getting that technical approach well placed and functioning for data sharing.
- The culture within the national security community; their willingness to engage openly and both security clearances and vetting are prominent areas where more needs to be done to break down barriers to innovation. Relevant stakeholders should be working together to open up the market by having a set of common and publicly available standards so that the community have more choice when executing a procurement. The market is currently limited in certain areas which means that if it is bespoke, it becomes more costly for policing and national security agencies to transform legacy systems which are in place for example. Early engagement and standards can therefore fix those problems of disconnect.
- Barriers to innovation: when looking within some of the more regional police forces, it is about the difficulty to maximise economies of scales. Larger policing organisations such as the MET Police, might be able to trial innovative ideas and solutions and establish an internal innovation function, or utilise innovative suppliers as they have the breadth to do so. Smaller forces across the country, have limited access to such solutions. The question here is 'how do we create this innovation factory for policing where despite your force size, you can tap into the availability of knowledge?'.
- Getting a consistent view of the classification of certain information, but also the perceived risk to the business if certain information, knowledge or intelligence is shared is a challenge. Coupled to that, the technical debt in and around the national security community at a government level, is preventing them to solve shared problems.
- For SMEs, it is difficult to get access to the end user to find out what the real problems are. When smaller suppliers get to speak to the end users, they find that there are similar issues between the security services and the MOD for example, around interoperability. A lot of the standards have to come from higher up the chain, paired with faster and more intelligent processing.
- Innovation comes from experimentation and empowerment of the right people on the ground. There is a lot of innovation available, but it is enabling it to come to fruition at scale is where the challenge is.
- Business-like organised crime is constantly innovating, deploying the latest technology, recruiting bright workers who sometimes are unaware that they are working for an organised crime group. These criminals are ahead of the curve compared to policing and what they can manage at scale.
- Traditional vetting processes have been reliant on manual research processing and can be quite cumbersome. It is important for industry to therefore understand how much acceleration can be provided using technologies such as AI and Automation as an innovative solution to a problem faced when trying to recruit for police forces and wider national security organisations.
techUK's National Security programme will continue to bring together government with subject matter experts across the National Security community to facilitate informed discussions about emerging technologies and their application to critical national security issues and more importantly, to identify solutions that could be implemented through policy changes.
If you would like to hear more about the discussions at the roundtable or share your thoughts on innovation, technology and national security then please do get in touch at [email protected]
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.
Cinzia Miatto
Cinzia joined techUK in August 2023 as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager.
Ella Gago-Brookes
Ella joined techUK in November 2023 as a Markets Team Assistant, supporting the Justice and Emergency Services, Central Government and Financial Services Programmes.