Finmeccanica UK

The UK public, Government and Emergency Services themselves all demand improved performance from the ‘Bluelight’ community. However, at a time of increased budgetary pressures and rising expectations, meeting these objectives is incredibly challenging.

With this in mind, Bluelightworks is a service that develops and maintains a collaborative partnership between practitioners, industry, academia and trade associations to explore, analyse and inform better efficiency, cooperation, shared best practice and cost reduction to meet user-defined strategic goals within the emergency services.

The Finmeccanica-led initiative supports public safety, criminal justice and bluelight organisations when they make strategic decisions about processes and procurement, working innovatively with technology, people, training and infrastructure to deliver evidence-based options that improve performance and cost efficiency. This is achieved by conducting a range of user-sponsored projects covering impartial research, trials and testing of various methods to deliver the evidence of what does and does not work.

During a speech in early 2016, UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, referenced a report by Bluelightworks which stated that the Police ICT Company "could support forces to make £75 million savings in their IT budgets and a further £390 million in wider organisational savings, enabled by combining and streamlining operational services supported by shared IT platforms."

She had previously commented how Bluelightworks has been instrumental in drawing attention to the potential savings in police IT contracts. In another speech, she said: "Police and Crime Commissioners are taking steps to better understand this issue [via] evidence collected by the Bluelightworks capability for the Police IT Board – which is led by Police and Crime Commissioners – about the spread of police IT contracts. While the report also found that some forces are sharing contracts, and others have plans to, we know that by acting alone forces fail to get the economy of scale necessary to deliver value for money.”

For further information about Bluelightworks and its activities, please visit the Bluelightworks website.