Front door
Industry engagement
Connecting real Home Office security challenges with the capabilities, insight and innovation that exist across industry and academia.
We work as a front door between the Home Office, operational partners, suppliers and SMEs, helping Home Office colleagues understand how they can use the private sector, and helping industry understand Home Office capability requirements, projects and policy initiatives.
We work with policy, operational and commercial colleagues to define the problem, identify where industry insight adds value, convene the right organisations and deliver something meaningful. That can include market insight, supplier roundtables, showcasing events, SME engagement, demand-signalling activity and follow-up readouts that inform policy, operational planning and future procurement.
In practice, we:
- Act as a front door for security and resilience suppliers, including SMEs, into the Home Office and wider security community.
- Help Home Office teams understand emerging capability, market developments and supplier innovation.
- Convene roundtables and showcases around specific operational or policy challenges.
- Support communication of procurement requirements to industry, so suppliers understand government priorities and capability needs.
- Connect industry, academia, operational partners and policymakers through events, workshops and flagship platforms such as Security & Policing.
- Capture insight and lessons from engagement, so activity leads to better decisions rather than one-off conversations.
Engagement in action
Border security and drugs detection
We have supported engagement between Border Force, Home Office customers and industry to explore how emerging detection technologies could address operational challenges at the border, using roundtables and follow-up engagement to understand what industry can offer and where further work may be useful.
Public safety and policing technologies
We have convened discussions and showcases on facial recognition, knife crime and AI in policing, bringing together government, law enforcement and suppliers to explore operational need, market capability and responsible use of technology.