Independent support for ESN transition
Planning, assurance and coverage evidence for police forces and emergency services preparing for ESN — bought by the day, by the month, or shared with other forces. No team to stand up.
Planning, assurance and coverage evidence for police forces and emergency services preparing for ESN — bought by the day, by the month, or shared with other forces. No team to stand up.
At The Emergency Services Show in September the ESN programme asked user organisations to stop treating transition as something that happens in a couple of years, and to begin planning in earnest. 2027 is not the year you transition. It is the year you find out whether you are ready to.
Most forces stood their ESN teams down in 2022 and 2023, and have said publicly that they will not rebuild them at the size they once were. The work has not got smaller: readiness assessment, project planning, enrolment and technical onboarding, device and vehicle strategy, control room integration, training needs analysis, business change, and the criteria a chief officer will eventually sign against.
That is the gap this service exists to fill — senior, independent expertise a force can draw on without creating a post.
Start anywhere. Most forces start with the first and decide from there.
A written view of where the force stands against the programme's own preparation model: what is in place, what is missing, what you have decided you cannot resource, and what has to happen before the 2027 pilots.
Building and maintaining the force project plan that feeds the national deployment plan, testing its assumptions before they harden into commitments, and carrying the enrolment, onboarding, training and business change workstreams alongside your people.
Independent measurement across your force area, in operational terms your officers would recognise — the evidence base for the Ready for Service decision, and for every conversation with the programme and its suppliers along the way.
A named senior lead providing part-time transition leadership where a force has nobody dedicated to ESN at all — shared across a small number of forces or a regional collaboration, with each force's work kept entirely its own.
| Shape | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Ad-hoc | Called off as needed, each piece agreed in writing beforehand — scope, effort and cost. No retainer, no minimum spend, no notice period. |
| Part-time | An agreed number of days each month across a defined period, so your transition lead has someone senior beside them. |
| Fractional (shared) | The same senior support provided to several forces or a regional collaboration. The programme-watching and the question set are done once and applied several times; your plan, your estate and your papers stay yours alone. |
| Interim | A named resource embedded for a defined period, to cover a vacancy or lead planning through a peak. |
Nothing is committed and nothing is charged until work is called off. Rates and fixed-price packages on request. Engagement is through Critical Insights Ltd, outside IR35; a status determination is available. UK Government Security Clearance (NSV) valid to 2028, and unaligned to any MCX platform or device vendor.
The programme and its suppliers want ESN to work, and they will produce their own assurance that it does. All of it is necessary. None of it answers the question a chief officer has to answer: would we be able to show our officers, and our Federation, why we believe this works here?
That answer rests on evidence the force owns — measured where officers actually work, at the times that matter, against criteria the force set. It is the same role we played for forces through the Airwave rollout: the independent party on the user's side of the table, able to say precisely what is not working, where, when and how often. One force described it as a big stick with which to hold the service provider to account.
“The subsequent report was very comprehensive, well presented and highlighted a number of very important network configuration issues … The Service Provider had visited these areas on a number of occasions, often reporting ‘No fault found’.” After the report, “each and every one of the issues was addressed.”
“The quality and detail of the reports have enabled us to approach Airwave with the authority to push for detailed examinations of identified ‘problem areas’, and thus improve coverage.”
“The collection of data enables post analysis, thus allowing WMP to prove that there are service delivery issues with the Airwave service … The analyser's ability to detect not only uplink interference but carrier imbalance is impressive. The Samdale tools are useful, have saved time in identifying faults and are practical to use.”
“My team and I have been impressed with the activity in all its facets. Your early identification of key issues — especially the in-call handover failures — was very well timed and valuable … In subsequent discussions with Airwave's regional radio planners, they expressed how Samdale's level of knowledge and depth of reporting and understanding was impressive.”
Andrew Fleet has worked in mission-critical communications since the TETRA era, through to 3GPP MCX. From 2001 he acted as independent “User Champion” to more than 20 UK police forces, SOCA (now the NCA) and National Highways during the Airwave rollout.
In 2002 he was the architect of the real-world coverage and performance assessment criteria used for the relaunch of Airwave into Greater Manchester Police after a rollout that frontline officers had stopped trusting, and negotiated the operationally viable service KPIs with the service provider on the force's behalf.
Since then: five years inside the Home Office ESN programme in user reassurance, coverage and device roles, and three years with Airbus Public Safety & Security on ESN bid support and MCX solution design to December 2025.
“The test system then in place did not provide any meaningful data in how the system was actually performing.” Samdale, “Andy Fleet in particular”, were responsible for devising a complete new test methodology that gave ownership to the user community, with users walking and driving defined routes and recording what they heard.
Twenty minutes now will save a great deal later. A readiness assessment is a short, self-contained first step — and it tells you whether you need anything else.
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