Police National Computer gets a facelift

The Police National Computer (PNC) has received a major upgrade, meaning officers will increasingly be able to use it for frontline police work over the next seven years.

The PNC - which celebrated record traffic last year - holds information about people, vehicles, property and crimes, which can all be accessed electronically by officers 24 hours per day.

The computer's processing power has been boosted with the installation of new hardware, and the disaster recovery system has also been made more secure and reliable.

No new services were added in the upgrade - the work was aimed at ensuring the PNC can continue to offer existing services and meet a predicted increase in demand.

The upgrade was completed at the beginning of February - ahead of schedule - and will support the PNC until 2014 when the new Police National Database is due to come into service.

The work was carried out by the Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito), a non-departmental body that until last weekend provided IT services to the police and other criminal justice organisations.

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Pito handed responsibility for the computer to the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) on Sunday (1 April).

An NPIA spokeswoman said the upgrade will mean continued high levels of availability and response times for existing services "in light of experienced and predicted increased usage".

The PNC was established in 1974 and supports the Phoenix national criminal record database, along with other services such as crime pattern analysis and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR).

Around 142 million requests were made using the computer last year. This excludes more than three million ANPR transactions made every day.