Police building burglary a double blow

The burglary of a police building in Newark could end up costing £300,000.

End of year accounts for Nottinghamshire Police for 2010-11 reveal five East Midlands forces are preparing for the possibility of a joint fine of up to £300,000 from the Information Commissioner's Office.

The forces believe they will be fined after a burglary at the East Midlands Collaboration Unit in Stephenson Way, off Brunel Drive, on August 14 last year.

The unit is where the Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire forces plan how to work more effectively.

As exclusively revealed by the Advertiser at the time, several laptop computers and a TV were taken.

A Nottinghamshire Police Authority spokesman said the £300,000 was a best guess at what the five forces would pay and the assumption was that any fine would be shared equally among them. Its share would be paid from reserves.

It has not been revealed what information the encrypted laptops contained.

A spokesman for the unit said: “The majority of work undertaken in the office is administrative, involving project work.

"Any information on the computers will not be readily accessible to third parties.

“Officers arrived within minutes, but the offenders had left with a number of items."

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner said: "An investigation involving Notts Police is ongoing. We are unable to give any further information at this stage."

The collaboration unit began when a merger between the five forces was being pushed by the Government in 2006.

Lincolnshire Police took out an initial three-year lease on the property, which has now been renewed, in secret at a cost to the taxpayer of £200,000.

When the merger plan was dropped in May, 2006, Lincolnshire Police was already committed to the lease.

Senior officers from forces and their police authorities meet at the unit.

Work carried out there included standardisation and joint procurement of uniforms, equipment and IT in bulk, cross-county policing procedures, and aspects of co-operative working such as shared use of helicopters, firearms and scenes-of-crime officers.

It came up with the idea for the new regional major crime unit that will tackle murders and other serious crimes.

The Information Commissioner's Office is an independent body that protects public data held on computers.

It has been able to issue fines of up to £500,000 for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act since April last year.