4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: August 2022 4.2 The Police National Computer (PNC) is a critical national infrastructure, and it is vital that it be constantly available to policing and other users to support law enforcement activities. 4.3 The majority of the hardware and software for PNC will be fully supported through to December 2025. Elements of the software provided by Software AG will go out of support at the end of 2024, however with the mitigation activity outlined below this is deemed to be an acceptable element of risk as Software AG is a highly stable element of the PNC. Risk mitigation activity includes the department: • upskilling internal teams and providing appropriate knowledge transfer from Software AG so that it will be able to manage any issues that may occur post December 2024. • engaging other partners who provide PNC services to ascertain the level of support it can provide post December 2024. • entering into commercial negotiations with Software AG to determine what levels of support can be made available post December 2024. 4.4 Nonetheless, the department does have a mitigation option to move PNC to a new platform and extend the life of the PNC should this prove necessary as an alternative approach to continuing with NLEDP. The programme is developing these contingency plans in parallel. A detailed assessment of re-platforming the PNC to extend it beyond December 2025 has recently completed and is currently being reviewed. Based on the department’s analysis and assessment of findings and recommendations of the assessment, the department will formulate an action plan in Half 1 of 2022 (on or before 30 June 2022), which will determine whether and when to trigger the mitigation option. 4.5 As the PNC re-platforming mitigation option is highly resource intensive and PNC intrusive, it is not possible to deliver both the NLEDP programme and the mitigation option in parallel, nor within the same SR settlement. Should the decision be taken to initiate the mitigation option, it would be necessary to pause the delivery of NLEDP until the PNC re-platforming activities have completed. Current estimates suggest NLEDP would be postponed for a further 2 to 3-year period. If the mitigation option is initiated, it is expected that the current SR settlement would be sufficient to cover the delivery of either re-platforming or NLEDP, but not both. 4.6 As an added complexity, in the event of initiating the mitigation option, doing so would change the current NLEDP delivery approach and so there’s no guarantee that work performed to date on NLEDP could be fully reused once PNC has been re platformed. This would likely therefore lead to a significant delay in delivering NLEDP and a significant increase in longer term delivery costs. 4.7 The department will provide a further progress update in April 2022.