The Department made poor decisions at the outset of the NLEDS programme and, despite signs it was going badly, was slow to make the necessary changes to correct this. The original scope and ambition for the NLEDS programme was unrealistic. The Department created a programme designed to replace two vital police information systems without fully understanding the police’s requirements or how these systems worked. The PNC had evolved over several decades as it was adapted and expanded. When the programme team attempted to understand how the PNC worked, it became clear that it was much more complex than the Department had anticipated, resulting in delays and large amounts of additional work. An early programme decision to merge the PNC and PND systems made the complexity worse because the two systems used very different data formats. As the consequences of these issues became apparent, a series of internal and external reviews highlighted that NLEDS was at risk of not delivering what the police needed. Despite these warnings, the Department did not step back to assess the fundamental problems that the programme had encountered, and its first programme reset in 2019 was not effective in addressing these problems. Following the second programme reset in late 2020, the Department then took several months to decide whether to proceed with the programme. Recommendation: The Permanent Secretary should ensure that he and other senior staff have sufficient regular oversight of NLEDS from now on, to ensure that he can quickly see problems as they arise and be prepared to take early and decisive action to recover or restructure the programme.