Catalogue description Home Office and Joint (Home Office and Metropolitan Police) ADP Unit: Automatic Data Processing Reports

An initial report on the possibilities for adopting automatic data processing in the Home Office was produced by a working party of that department in 1958. This report included a recommendation for liaison with the Metropolitan Police and, in April 1959, the Home Office, Prison Commission and Metropolitan Police Joint ADP Unit (JADPU) was formed. The preliminary report of this body, published later in that year, emphasised the mutual interests of the Home Office (including the then separate Prison Commission) and the Metropolitan Police in many areas of work which seemed susceptible to automatic data processing. There were local police, Metropolitan Police and national interests in both aliens' records and criminal records: the latter were linked with prisoners' records and with criminal statistics. It therefore made the recommendation that, wherever possible, functionally-related work should be integrated without regard to existing departmental demarcations and the practicability of acquiring and operating a large-scale common service ADP system examined.

These studies were of importance in influencing the formation of the Police National Computer Unit and the later establishment, after the Joint ADP Unit was disbanded in 1981, of the separate computing services functions of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police.