The UK’s National Crime Agency has been told that its IT infrastructure “isn’t fit for purpose” following a review by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services.

As covered by The Register, while the NCA received a “good” rating in many areas surrounding its operations, its IT estate was raised as a cause for concern.

The report states categorically that the NCA must “urgently improve its IT capability and strategy.”

“The National Crime Agency (NCA)’s IT infrastructure isn’t fit for purpose. This systemic weakness affects the entire agency, and we mention it many times throughout this report. It significantly hinders its ability to operate effectively and efficiently. It also stifles innovation and creates an over-reliance on inefficient manual processes,” it adds.

This is put down to a “lack of investment in IT infrastructure,” which has led to technical debt, with the NCA having prioritized quick fixes “over long-term investment.”

“During our inspection, some interviewees told us that the agency’s IT was a major factor that inhibited their productivity and efficiency. Most of the officers we interviewed were critical of the existing systems, which many of them didn’t trust.”

According to the review, an NCA employee told the HM Inspectorate that they achieve results “in spite” of the IT technology.

While the NCA has a corporate system called ATLAS CM that should be used for case management, the agency is actually using up to 50 different management methods to handle workloads due to a lack of confidence in the system.

In September 2025, a separate report from the HM Inspectorate found that the NCA was relying on as many as 260 legacy IT systems.

The HM Inspectorate has made three recommendations for the NCA, of which the agency has until the end of September to implement.

First, it recommends that the NCA, in partnership with the Home Office, should develop a long-term IT strategy that defines the NCA’s IT requirements and removes dependence on legacy systems. Secondly, it suggests a medium-term financial strategy should be planned to establish future costs, priorities for investment, and likely financial challenges. Finally, the NCA should specifically develop a plan for improving its HR and finance IT processes.

The NCA has access to the Police National Computer, which is currently housed in the Hendon Data Centre – a 7,230 sqm (77,835 sq ft) facility located on Aerodrome Road.

In 2024, the UK Home Office announced plans for a £10m ($13.3m) project to exit the data center and replace the PNC with a cloud-based system dubbed LEDS (the Law Enforcement Data Service) as part of a three-year cloud migration.

Separate from the PNC but part of an effort to migrate law-enforcement compute to the cloud, in May 2026 the Home Office announced it was abandoning the attempts to migrate the Police National Database (PND) to the cloud, after costs continued to rise and it found that only around 20 percent of the code was reusable, leading to excessive delays.