Hard on the heels of Gordon Brown's promise to equip 10,000 police officers with their own hand-held computers - or BlackBerries as they are known among the management classes - Tony McNulty, the police minister, has admitted that "some kind of hysteria" comes over ministers when it comes to new technology.
"We over-promise and under-deliver," he admitted to a Progress-Police Federation fringe meeting.
But what computer network are all those BlackBerries going to be connected to?
Mr McNulty admitted to Jan Berry, the chair of the Police Federation, that he could not promise that the police would have an integrated computer system which allowed officers to talk to each other in each of the 43 different police forces by the time she retired next May.
Ms Berry told the meeting that the difficulties caused by each force having its own computer system had been raised at the first national council meeting of the Police Federation she had attended in the early 1990s.
"If we did announce that we had managed to get all 43 police forces to talk to each other by computer the public would turn round and say, 'What do you meant the police can't talk to each other?'" said Mr McNulty.
He also thinks they shouldn't have 43 different uniform manufacturers or car providers but the minister firmly insisted that police force mergers are not coming back on to his agenda - for now.
