National plan for fingerprints is abandoned

Police in England and Wales have been forced to abandon automatic fingerprint recognition (AFR) and return to laborious comparison by eye because of problems with the multi-million pound computer system.

A consortium representing the bulk of police forces in England and Wales has sacked the company running its system for the last two years, the multinational IBM, and is seeking compensation which could run into millions of pounds over what it claims is a failure to honour the servicing contract.

With the Metropolitan Police in London about to "go live" with its £6m digitalised fingerprint system next month, and forces in Scotland stating that their system, introduced several years ago, is proving "highly productive", it is an acute embarrassment for the consortium to have to return, as one insider put it, "to the Stone Age of fingerprint technology".

The failure of the system is the latest in a series of problems which have dogged British attempts to catch up with many other countries in creating an automatic fingerprint system.

In the early 1990s the consortium forces decided they would go it alone with the IBM system because of unhappiness with the timetable for a national AFR system that had been set by the Home Office.

This followed several years of frustration at the policy of the Home Office to design its own method of comparison rather than buy "off the shelf" systems. The consortium eventually comprised most forces in the country, but the Metropolitan Police and Kent, which had bought its own system, were left out, weakening its effectiveness as a truly national database. IBM confirmed last night that the AFR consortium had informed it last week that they planned to terminate the contract. On 24 March police forces in the consortium began logging off the AFR system. Although IBM's statement yesterday left the door partially open for a renegotiation of the complex computer deal, IBM said the "UK public have been deprived of the benefits of this highly effective criminal detection system". The company added that it believed the operational effectiveness of the UK police had been "seriously compromised". The cancellation, according to IBM "jeopardises public safety and is not in the public interest". Since it set up in 1992 the AFR consortium system has been responsible for 125,000 successful identifications. A spokesman for the Hampshire police, which led the consortium, said: "There is no doubt about the effective accuracy of the system. There havebeen good results. However, there has been difficulty in how IBM have serviced this network." The spokesman confirmed that "civil litigation was in the wind" with the consortium likely to seek compensation in excess of £10m. In anticipation of the cancelling of the IBM contract, Hampshire police confirmed that the consortium had begun negotiations with Lockheed Martin, a US-based software and management company. Discussions had focused over ways of quickly building a new system. Although IBM was invited to assist in helping to redesign a new system it refused. IBM said yesterday that setting up an alternative system would take a minimum of six months to a year. The collapse of the AFR consortium's go-it-alone system may be seen as a vindication of the Home Office's slow-but-sure approach in trying to deliver a national project.