The Home Office has released a report entitled High Level Working Group Report on Police Value For Money. The report outlines how the UK’s police authorities and forces will meeting savings targets of at least £100 million in 2010/11 followed by £500m from 2013/2014 without negatively impacting upon the level of service provided to the public. This is a tall order on the basis that 80% of expenditure lies in personnel, but it is clear that approaches to purchasing decisions will have to be reconsidered.  Spending on IT will come under particular scrutiny as the largest category within goods and services expenditure and the need for better collaborative working and regionalisation of services must be a key driver. ABM has continued to supply both enterprise and workgroup covert systems to policing for the last 15 years and the work which it has conducted in implementing a regional Intelligence system in Scotland must be seen as a model for the future.  The key to the delivery of collaborative IT is to make sure that the collaboration delivers both better ‘value for money’ as well as enhanced operational performance.  There are plenty of examples of how this works already and these examples must be built upon rather than “reinventing the wheel”.