With big changes ahead for our emergency services customers, our partnerships have evolved to match

Change in every direction

The emergency services are facing change of all kinds. The King’s Speech confirmed the government’s intention to implement the policing white paper, ushering in major reforms to force numbers, boundaries and governance. The impact will reach fire and rescue services too, requiring new collaboration processes alongside a parallel restructure in local government.

Even without these developments, the type and frequency of emergency responses was already shifting. Rising 999 call volumes and new threats have not only stretched resources but also created workforce challenges, with rising levels of burnout affecting recruitment and retention.

By innovating our technologies, we’ve been helping to relieve some of the pressure. We’ve also been changing how we work.

Creating closer partnerships

In the last few years, we’ve built a dedicated customer experience team. Working alongside skilled product managers, they ensure tight alignment between customer ambitions, technology investment and robust delivery plans.

We’ve also reinvigorated our user groups, sharing roadmaps and creating discussion forums to get us as close to our customers as we can. Regular satisfaction surveys then keep performance front of mind for everyone, with action plans involving every team from product development to implementation. It’s a process that’s proved vital to identifying where something new could deliver better outcomes.

Extending our capability

Giving time back to skilled officers is central to what we do, and innovating in this area relies on strong relationships. Partnering with one customer and a leading safety charity, we’re working with our colleagues at NEC Labs at the cutting edge of AI, developing agentic solutions to help assess threat, harm and risk in the control room and better protect vulnerable communities.

Our acquisition of Cadcorp also brings added strength in mapping and spatial analysis, ensuring stretched resources are always focused on the right places. And our new partnership with Unblur will enable the real-time exchange of information between control rooms and frontline responders, giving everyone the most accurate operational picture when lives might be on the line.

Knowing that trust is built between people

No matter how cutting edge any technology is, the best relationships are built by people. Our team can point to decades of experience supporting the emergency services in control rooms and beyond, and to a robust record on delivery. It gives our customers the confidence that we understand not just the challenges they face but also their working environments.

As the changes keep coming, we’re ready to work with our customers at every level, making small changes or co-creating new strategies that help them keep their communities safe every day.

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Steve Ainsworth is executive director for public safety at NEC Software Solutions