Met Police Issues £72M Procurement for Digital Public Contact Platform Services

Christian Bace, Strategic Communications Lead for the Digital Public Contact Programme (part of the NPCC Public Contact Portfolio), provided clarification on the scope of this procurement. According to Bace, the £72 million figure relates to a multi-year procurement for the ongoing service management and operation of the existing Digital Public Contact platform — including Single Online Home, iHub, NMPP, and related services — and is not a standalone investment in AI, nor a national AI deployment programme. AI is one smaller component within the broader platform and service delivery contract. The headline, summary, and body have been updated to reflect that the procurement is primarily about managing and consolidating existing services, with AI as one component. Source: emailed correspondence from Christian Bace, Digital Public Contact Programme / Metropolitan Police, May 18, 2026.

According to The Register, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), acting on behalf of the National Police Chiefs Council, has issued a procurement seeking a single supplier to manage and operate the existing Digital Public Contact platform under a £72 million multi-year service contract covering July 2027 to December 2029, with a possible three-year extension. The Register reports the platform underpins the Single Online Home websites, Police.uk, Data.police.uk, iHub, and the National My Police Portal (NMPP), the latter using GOV.UK One Login in current pilots. As clarified by the Digital Public Contact Programme, the procurement is primarily for the ongoing service management and consolidation of these existing public-contact services, not for an AI deployment.

The Register reports that in March, West Yorkshire Police and the Digital Public Contact platform started using AI to extract material from archived control-room calls — one operational component within the broader service. The Register quotes Cambridgeshire chief constable Simon Megicks describing a separate assistance service: "It supports call handlers in real time, and as they converse, the AI listens in and conducts live database searches, surfacing relevant information instantly," at a National Police Chiefs Council innovation event. The article also notes a pilot of a natural-language switchboard being trialed by Humberside Police. Per the Digital Public Contact Programme, these AI elements are individual components within the wider service delivery scope rather than the focus of the £72M procurement.

For practitioners, multi-year service-management contracts at this scale matter because they consolidate operating responsibilities for several existing public-contact platforms under a single supplier. Where AI features as one component within broader service delivery, the integration constraints are typically those of legacy-system operation: data integration, audit logging, retention controls, and continuity of existing services, alongside any AI-specific transcription, redaction, or live-assist pipelines.

Observed patterns in comparable public-sector service-management procurements show that auditing, traceability, and procurement-stage security reviews become critical early constraints, and that consolidating multiple existing platforms under one supplier requires careful handover and continuity planning. Individual AI features, such as extraction from legacy audio or real-time call-handler assistance, often require bespoke pipelines but typically sit alongside the broader operational scope rather than driving the procurement.

Indicators to follow include the selected supplier's overall approach to service consolidation, whether procurement documents disclose privacy and retention controls, pilot outcomes from the Humberside switchboard trial and the West Yorkshire archival-audio AI pilot, and any published technical specifications or regulatory assessments cited in subsequent notices.