Aker Systems supports UK police and law enforcement with next generation National Strategic ANPR Platform (NSAP)

The Client

The Police and Public Protection Technology Portfolio (PPPT), part of Home Office Digital, leads the modernisation of national policing infrastructure. PPPT designs, builds, and operates mission-critical systems — including the Police National Computer (PNC), National ANPR Service (NAS), and ViSOR — that form the digital backbone of UK law enforcement.

Within this landscape, the National ANPR Capability is a cornerstone of UK policing and security operations. It provides the data and intelligence enabling forces to detect, deter, and disrupt crime and terrorism, enforce road laws, locate vehicles of interest, and protect vulnerable persons from harm. 

To future-proof this capability, the Home Office commissioned the National Strategic ANPR Platform (NSAP) — a next-generation, cloud-native platform designed to securely ingest, process, and exploit ANPR data at national scale, supporting operational policing and intelligence-led decision-making across all 43 forces.

The Challenge

The existing national ANPR infrastructure, centred around legacy data centres, has resilience and performance issues, and is costly to maintain, difficult to evolve, and unable to handle the scale and performance demands of modern law enforcement.  

Resilience, reliability and availability are the key drivers for UK law enforcement ANPR capability therefore a complete re-engineering of the national ANPR data architecture was required — one that could deliver critical, real-time intelligence to support policing operations.

The mission of the NSAP is:

• To strengthen and develop the existing fundamental capabilities that ANPR brings to protecting the public and reducing crime
• To realise potential of ANPR intelligence and its application in law enforcement in intelligence, investigation, public protection, and road safety
• To maximise the benefits from ANPR data and systems ensuring cost-effective consistent efficient and effective use of ANPR
• To ensure public confidence in the development, management, and use of ANPR by police forces and LEAs taking account of privacy concerns, and maximising transparency
• Create a flexible environment for innovation at the local, regional, and national level

The Solution​

Working in partnership with PPPT, Aker Systems designed, built, and operates the National Strategic ANPR Platform (NSAP) - a secure, cloud-native platform that enables UK policing to access ANPR data at scale and speed. The platform delivers real-time performance, resilience, and interoperability across the national law-enforcement ecosystem.

NSAP processes 350+ million reads per day from ANPR cameras across the UK, providing raw ANPR data that enables actionable intelligence in near real-time. 

The architecture follows a four-stage pattern — Gateway, Ingest, Screen, Exploit — optimised for high throughput, resilience, and sub-second performance:

1. Gateway: Secure, encrypted gateways, streaming national vehicle data continuously into NSAP — over 350 million events daily.
2. Ingest: Processes up to 12,000 events per second, maintaining throughput under pressure while storing critical events for retention and analysis purposes.
3. Screen: Matches incoming reads against live vehicle of interest lists and intelligence sources, referencing a state store of 45+ million records refreshed in real time.
4. Exploit: Delivers sub-millisecond alerts to operational users and enables analysts fast access to 36B+ reads and 70B+ images for investigations, trend analysis, and case building.

Engineering highlights

• 350M events/day; scalable beyond 30K events/sec
• Sub-2 second SLAs for search and alerting
• Horizontally scalable infrastructure with dynamic autoscaling
• 270+ operational alerts for full data and system observability
• End-to-end encryption, access control, and lineage for evidential integrity

Delivered through a DevSecOps-led delivery model, NSAP achieved, in twelve months, over 30 production releases, 2,200+ automated test runs, and full 24×7 operational coverage — establishing a new standard for secure digital delivery in policing.

The Technology 

NSAP is underpinned by AWS-native streaming and analytics services, architected to meet the Home Office’s high standards for assurance, auditability, resilience and scale. 

Core technology stack

• Amazon MSK (Kafka): High-throughput event backbone for ingestion.
• Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink: Stream processing, rules and stateful lookups.
• AWS Lambda: Event distribution and integration with downstream alerting and analytics systems.
• Amazon OpenSearch: Real-time search and investigative analytics.
• DynamoDB and S3: Ultra-fast lookups and durable, evidential data storage.

The Value

The NSAP programme delivers a step-change in national ANPR capability provision for UK policing — consolidating legacy systems into a unified, cloud-native platform designed for high availability, resilience, and continuous evolution.

Operational and strategic impact:

• Real-time intelligence and alerting across all 43 UK police forces.
• Fast and accurate detection, disruption and investigations
• Enables fast and flexible analytical querying.
• Reduces technical debt and enables legacy data centre decommissioning.
• Created trusted, standards-aligned data foundations for evidence and audit.
• Establishes a firm foundation for more advanced analytics and interoperability across the Law Enforcement Cloud ecosystem.

Through NSAP, Aker Systems is helping the Home Office to deliver this significant data-modernisation programme in UK policing and law enforcement, providing a secure, real-time foundation for intelligence-led law enforcement and public protection.

‍