Wiltshire Police Change IT Sharing

Wiltshire Police will no longer share IT services with Wiltshire Council.

22:09 05 August 2019

Wiltshire Police and Wiltshire Council will stop sharing IT services effectively immediately. The decision comes after they were pressured to improve cyber security by using more specialist national systems. 

 

 

 

Wiltshire Council has been a subject of numerous cyber attacks in the months following the 2018 Salisbury Novichok attack.

 

 

 

Last month, council staff members were prevented from bringing Bluetooth devices and mobile phones during council meetings. Executive director Alistair Cunningham said: “As soon as we hit the headlines, the number of cyber attacks on our system increased tenfold.”

 

 

 

Cllr Tony Jackson supports the move to cut ties with the force.

 

 

 

He said: “This is an extremely sound move. I think to anticipate in ten years time we will have 43 police forces is not something I think is sensible, the sooner we split from Wiltshire Police the better.”

 

 

 

But others disagreed and council leader Philip Whitehead added: “It has been an extremely successful partnership in the past, we are now into consciously uncoupling it to pull it apart. This has come about through national changes in terms of the security the police must operate to, which does not suit us.”

 

 

 

Cllr Ian Blair Pilling said: “We lose the economy of scale, unfortunately. We will have a reduced income as they had been paying some costs towards this mutually agreeable system.”