Met Police awards £600m deal to Capgemini

Capgemini has been named the winner of a fiercely-contested IT infrastructure outsourcing deal with the London Metropolitan Police.

Under the five-year contract, the value of which was put at £600m in the original tender document, Capgemini will provide the MPS with a flexible and agile service designed to deliver an improved user experience for its more than 44,000 frontline officers and staff and improve its digital interaction with citizens. Specific services covered by the deal include data centre, desktop, networks and service management. 

This award marks the latest iteration in the Met’s IT outsourcing strategy which stretches back over several decades. The current cycle will see it consolidate the multi-tower approach it started between 2015 and 2017, when it awarded a service integration and management deal to Atos, network services deal to BT, hosting and end user services to DXC, and application services to Accenture. 

Capgemini will consolidate many of the infrastructure elements under the new engagement, while a separate award for applications services is scheduled for later this year, as part of what it calls its “Pegasus” programme. For Capgemini, the win marks a return to favour with the Met, having previously served as one of its primary partners between the 1990s and mid-2010s. 

The Met Police is the UK’s largest police force and has always been something of an outlier in terms of its aggressive approach to outsourcing. While regional forces remain under huge pressure to drive efficiency in order to protect funding for frontline services, the move towards outsourcing or shared services delivery for both IT and other back office services has been slow. 

If anything, the recent direction of travel has been the opposite way, with forces in Lincolnshire and Cleveland bringing back in-house services that were previously delivered by their respective partners Serco and Sopra Steria. While the Met Police is big and complex enough to make the economics of outsourcing attractive, we don’t expect the announcement of the new deal with Capgemini to trigger a new wave of outsourcing in the wider policing space.

Instead, the greater number opportunities for software and IT services suppliers are likely to emerge in supporting the National Policing IT Strategy are in helping forces to adopt standard off-the-shelf, cloud-based software and services instead of custom systems, and in helping them to build on the current momentum in automating processes such as digital evidence collection and analysis – an area where the business case for automation really landed during lockdown.