The Department told us that there would be a separate five-year programme for the PND, starting from April 2022.54 The Department said it had been working with the NPCC lead for the PND over the last nine months on a “discovery phase”, developing a strategy of which the key element was currently the refresh of software and hardware. Then there would be the “near-term capability uplifts”. Then they would turn to “realising the original vision of actually having that federated search capability across the PNC, PND and then wider datasets across law enforcement into the future as well.” The Department said it would be doing things very differently to what was envisaged before, to join up PND and PNC systems. Rather than putting the two systems within the same ‘monolithic structure’, it would achieve the same goals in a “different, much easier and less complex way”, which is that “federated search capability”.55 The Department’s delivery of major programmes