Zero crimes recorded in official stats for Devon and Cornwall Police last year due to IT failure

Zero crimes have been recorded in the official 2022 statistics for Devon and Cornwall Police due to problems with the installation of a new IT system for recording offences.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) usually publishes the crime figures for all 43 forces in England and Wales but the Devon and Cornwall force failed to submit a full set of statistics due to the implementation of a new multi-million pound operating system from Canadian firm Niche Technology.

The Niche Record Management Systems (RMS) is used by 26 other police forces in England and Wales, but only Devon and Cornwall failed to submit its full 2022 crime statistics to the ONS.

The failure follows a warning from His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary that the force should improve its crime reporting systems.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said: “Due to the implementation of our new operational system, Niche, we have not been able to provide the data for the last quarter of the 12-month period to the Home Office/ONS.

“As a result, our data will not be shown in the data tables. This is not unusual during the transition to new systems and the ONS has a standard caveat that they will apply to the data tables to explain the absence of our data.”

As a result of failing to provide figures for the entire year, none of Devon and Cornwall’s crime statistics for 2022 were included in the latest numbers from the ONS.

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The South West police force agreed a ten-year deal for the Niche RMS three years ago to help collaborate with neighbouring forces in Dorset and in order to launch a “a shared operational platform” to battle crimes across county lines.

In its most recent report on Devon and Cornwall Police from 2022, HM Inspector of Constabulary ranked the force’s ability to record data about crime as “inadequate”.

The report added that the force had failed to record around one in six crimes, which equates to18,900 incidents.

The force is recording even fewer violent crimes with almost one in five missed in the 2021-22 annual period, compared to less than one in ten being missed in 2017.

In her introduction to the report on the force, Wendy Williams, HM Inspector of Constabulary, wrote: “The force doesn’t always record crimes against vulnerable victims, particularly violent or behavioural crimes, and antisocial behaviour.

“It also needs to record domestic abuse related crimes better. It should improve its auditing and oversight to help with this. Failure to record a crime often results in victims not being properly safeguarded and no investigation taking place.”

Ms Williams also criticised the force’s performance on managing the risks of registered sexual and violent offenders, as well as stating that it “doesn’t answer, or respond to, emergency or non-emergency calls within adequate time frames” leading to “too many members of the public abandoning their calls”.

Devon and Cornwall Police is not the only force to have been criticised over IT issues in recent weeks.

Officers in the Greater Manchester Police said they had been forced to put pen to paper after experiencing problems with its Integrated Police Operating System (iOPS) crime system.

It is understood the issue related to an upgrade to the “Police Works” element of the IT system, but that this was fixed swiftly.

GMP switched to the £29m iOPS at the end of last summer in a move designed to transform technology within the force.

But it has been beset with issues including lost information, continual crashes, safeguarding concerns, a lack of training and the length of time taken to enter data.

However, scrutiny of the rollout continues after the force was unable to tell the Government exactly what crimes occurred in Greater Manchester in the second half of last year due to problems with iOPS.