AirwaveSpeak is part of a broader strategy by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) to assist police forces to increase efficiency, enhance interoperability and support frontline policing.

Feedback from forces raising concerns over the standards in radio discipline led to the development of a common national standard. A team of linguistic professionals working as Prolingua, were employed to develop the standard alongside a group of police officers and staff - including representatives from the Federation and Unison.

Richard Earland, Chief Information Officer at the NPIA said, "AirwaveSpeak was developed to improve communication between radio users and across force borders. It is sensible to support Airwave users so that they have a succinct and simple language to use over the air. Our role is to assist in the implementation of the standard to aid forces to deliver a better service to the public."

AirwaveSpeak offers a number of benefits which has an impact on the general public.
Key benefits include:

• It provides a clear radio language which can be easily utilised and understood by all police forces using everyday terminology.
• It will ensure clear and unambiguous transmissions when different forces and police organisations are interoperating at major and national events.
• It provides a potential cost benefit as verbal clarity in initial transmissions and shorter transmissions equate to fewer repeated messages and less 'air time' being used, thus reducing costs.
• Standardisation of terminology should result in improved radio discipline and assist communications room staff in terms of recording clear information.
• Opportunity for users to speak where there is currently suppressed demand due to unnecessary lengthy voice transmissions.

Notes to editors:

About NPIA
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is a single national support agency led by the police, for the police and has been created through the work of ACPO, APA and the Home Office. 
NPIA provides leadership and expertise to the police service in areas as diverse as information and communications technology, support to information and intelligence sharing, core police processes, managing change and recruiting, developing and deploying people. 
NPIA works for the police service and directly supports forces to deliver improvements today and into the future. 

About Prolingua
Prolingua Ltd was contracted to deliver AiraveSpeak and is led by Professor Edward Johnson of Cambridge University. Johnson established the research field of mission critical, operational communications in the nineteen eighties when commissioned to build the linguistic components for maritime VHF Seaspeak (adopted by the International Maritime Organisation in 1986). A series of successful practical projects in related applications has followed Seaspeak including Airspeak (Air Traffic Control Radio Procedure and Phraseology for Pilots) and now AirwaveSpeak.