CDS wins the work to build the Metropolitan Police's first online services — the foundation of what becomes Single Online Home. The platform launches with a single form: an online Road Traffic Incident report for Greater London.
One form, one force. The seed of a national platform.
The decision is made to trial the Met platform for national benefit. A proof of concept with Thames Valley and Hampshire Constabulary validates the multi-tenanted model — one platform serving many forces.
Two forces prove what one platform can do for many.
CDS is awarded a multi-year contract to productionise the proof of concept and begin the national roll-out — targeting 20 forces in the first two years.
From experiment to programme: SOH gets its name and its mandate.
SOH grows its capability portfolio: live chat, a police.uk front-end rebuild and Know Your Area. The platform wins the Digital Impact Award 2019.
From a single form to a broad portfolio of public-facing services.
As the country went into lockdown, demand for SOH services rose five-fold. CDS worked closely with our ecosystem partners to scale platform capacity, and opened services to all non-SOH forces via police.uk. The platform comfortably met the demand — supporting the public and policing through an unprecedented time.
Demand up 5×, and the platform did not blink.
With the UK Cloud on-premise environment approaching end of life, CDS executes a full platform migration to Microsoft Azure in around 3 months against a 6-month estimate, with zero downtime — saving £200,000 a year.
Half the projected time. No interruption to the public.
With a VPN proposal ready to sign, CDS identifies a stronger approach built on Cloudflare. It becomes the first public-sector Cloudflare Zero Trust deployment in the world.
A better answer than the one already on the table.
CDS begins building the National My Police Portal — enabling asynchronous, recorded, two-way communication between the public and police officers. It launches with South Yorkshire Police in early 2025.
Not just reporting in — a recorded conversation back out.
A ministerial directive from the Home Office required a national, standardised policing app. Active development took approximately two weeks in February 2024, and shipped to both app stores on schedule.
Two weeks of build, on both stores, on schedule.
With the self-hosted Optimizely v11 instance reaching end of life, CDS migrates the platform to Optimizely DXP — moving SOH onto a fully cloud-hosted digital experience platform, ready for its next decade.
In progress — the platform keeps evolving.
From one online form to a national platform: SOH now serves 41 forces with two-way conversations, world-first zero-trust security and a cloud-native foundation. The work continues.
Built, scaled and re-platformed with CDS.