I know computer suppliers see government projects coming from a mile off, and the government is to blame for this. The obvoius point is that given you have 3 emergency sevices requiring the same/very similar functionality why isn't it one computer system project for all three services combined? It wouldn't have cost much more than the 10 million the police spent and overall probably would have saved money. The above aside even, so the police system cost 10 million to develop, but it's developed now and it works, the supplier isn't going to get any more money for it (apart from maintainence). So if you approach the supplier and say here's 2 million let us use the software, chances are there's a deal to be done. I know it's too late now, but the approach is charactersitic of government spending and wasting money. 2 million pounds is a lot of money, especially for a piece of software that appears to have no more functionality than Royal Mail's postcode address finder.