National Policing Improvement Agency | |
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Abbreviation | NPIA |
Logo of the National Policing Improvement Agency
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Agency overview | |
Formed | 1 April, 2007 |
Preceding agencies |
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Dissolved | 7 October 2013 |
Superseding agency | College of Policing Serious Organised Crime Agency (now National Crime Agency) Home Office |
Employees | 1,629 (September 2011); 2,100 (2009) |
Annual budget | £380M (2011/12); £474M (2008/09) |
Legal personality | Governmental: Government agency |
Jurisdictional structure | |
National agency (Operations jurisdiction) |
UK |
England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland | |
Size | 244 821 km² / 94,526 sq mi |
Population | 60,609,153 |
Legal jurisdiction | England and Wales, less in Scotland and Northern Ireland |
Governing body | Home Office |
General nature |
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Operational structure | |
Headquarters | London |
Website | |
www |
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) was a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom, established to support police by providing expertise in such areas as information technology, information sharing, and recruitment.
It was announced in December 2011 that the NPIA would be gradually wound down and its functions transferred to other organisations. By December 2012, all operations had been transferred to the Home Office, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and the newly established College of Policing. SOCA was itself replaced by the National Crime Agency on 7 October 2013 as a feature of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which also formally abolished the NPIA.
The motivations for creating the National Policing Improvement Agency were laid out in the 2004 Police Reform white paper Building Communities, Beating Crime which stated: "...the mechanisms for national policing improvements are disparate and overlapping." Additionally, in 2004 Hazel Blears commissioned an end-to-end review of the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) which concluded that "The tripartite governance structure is inappropriate for efficiently and effectively delivering services" and that "PITO as a concept is fundamentally flawed".
The NPIA was proposed by the Association of Chief Police Officers for England & Wales (ACPO) as a response to the UK government's green paper Building Safer Communities Together. The stated objective of the NPIA was to support the delivery of more effective policing and foster a culture of self-improvement around policing in the United Kingdom. Unlike PITO, it was planned that it would not be solely a supplier of national police IT systems. The key priorities of the NPIA were set by the National Policing Board, established in July 2006 to help strengthen the governance of policing in England and Wales. The National Policing Board, chaired by the Home Secretary, has a tripartite membership from the Home Office, ACPO and the Association of Police Authorities (APA).