FY 23/24 Budget Submission and Planned Deliverables

As outlined previously, the Target Operating Model (TOM) produced to fully deliver the Cyber Strategy.

The PDWP in fully recognising the current budgetary pressures, have reviewed the TOM with a view to identifying the most cost effective deliverables with a key focus on the following 3 priority areas:

Pursue

Recognising Police Scotland’s statutory responsibility to ‘Keep People Safe’ in the digital world and relentlessly pursuing those who seek to cause harm through cyber-criminality. This requires the enhancement of our capacity and capabilities, so that we equip our people with better tools, techniques, training and skillsets to impact against the highest online harms.  We will therefore focus on improving our digital forensics capability and our response to Online CSAE and Fraud.

Linked to this is the recognition that continually adding more people is not a long-term solution and Police Scotland require to introduce new technologies to make processes more efficient. The inclusion of the Rights Based Pathway in this paper, will provide a mechanism to ensure that technologies introduced by Police Scotland have been assessed as legal, ethical and have the requisite safeguards and assurances around public safety and confidence.

Prevention

It is clear that as more crimes are being increasingly committed online and have a digital footprint, that Police Scotland will be unable to ‘arrest their way out of this problem’. Greater effort will need to be applied to ensuring that we do all we can to educate and inform the public on the threats and trends that are occurring in the digital world.

Through the sharing of intelligence and encouraging and supporting the public and businesses to maximise prevention, it is assessed that a significant quantity of cyber-offences could be reduced. It is recognised that this is not solely the responsibility of the police, which links to the following point around partnerships.

Partnerships

Police Scotland recognise that there are multiple agencies and organisations who have a footprint in cyber security, investigation and intelligence. This includes organisations such as Cyber Scotland and the proposed Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre (SC3).

There is therefore a need for Police Scotland to continue to collaborate across the entire cyber sector in Scotland, to pull together the collective resources, so that we become more than the sum of our parts. Cyber-criminality is an existential threat to us all and Police Scotland are appealing to the broader cyber community to become involved in a mapping exercise which will allow us all to understand the gaps and overlaps and where are collective efforts should be focused.

Police Scotland have already successfully proven the worth of such arrangements, through the creation of a Multi-Agency Fraud Hub, with the banking and financial sector to share information and solutions in the growing crime area of online fraud.

In line with the 3 priority areas, it is the ambition of the PDWP to deliver a variety of products and services across a number of projects, during the 2023/24 financial year. A draft budget proposal for the next 3 financial years has been submitted along with the associated proposed delivery plan.