NEW technology to keep North Yorkshire Police officers on the streets longer will be delayed by at least nine months.

Last year, Chief Constable Dave Jones and Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan announced investment of £10 million in new technology across the force, which would focus on the Mobile Asset Utilization Deployment System (MAUDS), which records data on movements of police vehicles, and new ‘mobile policing’ kit to allow officers to complete paperwork away from the station.

The changes were to enable officers to spend more time on front-line policing, but almost a year on, the introduction of this technology has been severely delayed, The Press can reveal.

A force spokeswoman said there had been “significant progress on both of these major initiatives”, but said “there has been a delay and we are behind on our original delivery schedule”.

MAUDS have been installed in vehicles across the NYP fleet, with the exception of some covert vehicles, and sample data is already being collected.

Officers will then be able to consult this to answer questions from the public about policing in local communities, but the information will not be publicly available.

The spokeswoman said there was “a considerable amount of quality testing” needed before the system was fully operational, with that now expected to be in March - nine months after the original target.

The spokeswoman said: “The MAUDS data that has been collected in this quality testing phase relates to vehicle movements, locations and speeds, but there is still work to do to get to the level of detail and accuracy that we require before we can go live. This is what we will be working on over the next few months.”

While the mobile technology handsets have already been bought, their introduction has been put back by nine months, and they will not be ready for use until December 2017.

York Press:

The spokeswoman said: “The key cause of the delay is that the Home Office introduced new requirements for police IT systems called Public Sector Network for Policing (PSNP), in 2015.

"We have to meet these requirements if we want to be able to connect to national systems such as the Police National Computer, so in effect they are mandatory.

“We had to re-prioritise all technology-related projects and divert our team to work on meeting the new standards, which meant other projects had to be paused for a time.”

Reasons for the delay include the creation of a new computer system to connect to the handsets, and software for the officers to use.

The spokeswoman said: “One of the challenges has been that we wanted a proper mobile technology solution, not just a computerised version of paper processes.

"So although we looked at off-the-shelf systems used by other forces, we decided that we needed to develop something more future-proof.

“We identified the supplier to build our system some time ago, and they have built a ‘proof of concept’ version which we know will work for us.

"We’ve been pressing ahead with this software development, and we expect to start initial testing in December.

"Our original plan for mobile units was to have full deployment by March 2017, but due to the nine month delay caused by PSNP, this will now be December 2017.”

Technology that has been increased as part of the £10m investment is Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), which monitors thousands of North Yorkshire road users each day, looking out for cross-border criminals.

The spokeswoman said the number of ANPR cameras had increased three-fold, and the force was “now responding to ANPR alerts on a daily basis”.

She said: “ANPR was also included in the £10m investment and this is going very well.

“We have become a national centre of excellence for the use of ANPR, and in November we hosted the third National ANPR Conference in York to share best practice.”