North Wales Police Seeks IT Service Contract Worth £40m

Reaching the end of their five-year contract with CGI, the North Wales Police are looking for new suppliers of IT services.

Services have been split into three separate contracts that could total more than £40m; however, considering the history of the department with IT vendors, it is unlikely that the three separate service contracts will be awarded to a single bidder.

When the North Wales Police and the Police and Crime Commissioner consolidated IT services under CGI in 2015, the expectation was that moving from multiple vendors to a single vendor would save the department a significant amount. However, less than a year later, the North Wales Police admitted that the change had not realized the expected savings.

Police CFO Kate Jackson spoke about the issue at a police and crime panel meeting, saying, ”We chose our IT supplier on April 1 which was supposed to save us around £700,000 per annum. Even after taking into account the well-publicised refund from the mobile phone provider, the IT and communications budget still shows a significant overspend.”

She continued, “We had expected some additional cost during the handover period but not on this scale.”

Now that the five-year agreement with CGI has come to a close, the department is once again looking for bidders for IT services, with services split into three separate contracts. Bidding is open through 23 August, with contracts running from 1 October 2022 through 30 September 2026.

The first contract is for managed workplace services, with a total contract value of £6.5m to £21m. This contract covers IT services, user support, software development, and hardware, software, and network consultancy.

The second, for enterprise systems services, covers data centre services, managing data networking and storage for the department’s on-premise data centres. This contract will have a total value of £1.7m to £12.1m.

The third contract will be worth between £1.7m and £12.1m, for enterprise communications services. This bid will cover provisioning, administration, and planning for network services, as well as the department’s voice and data network.

Along with reconfiguring the IT services budget, the North Wales Police Department has added a significant number of officers to the rolls – 147 in the past two years – bringing the total number of officers to 1,654.