PAC warns on “staggering” cost of Home Office border security tech failures

The Home Office continues a miserable record of exorbitantly expensive digital programmes that fail to deliver for the taxpayer or for border security, says the Public Accounts Committee in a report today, due to a “lack of effective leadership, management and oversight”.

Delays to the Digital Services at the Border (DSAB) programme have cost the taxpayer £173 million so far. The ‘Border Crossing’ part of the programme is being used by only 300 border staff, against the 7,000 supposed to be using the system by June 2021, and previous attempts to roll out Border Crossing experienced technical difficulties.

The Home Office is planning for more than 140 million passengers a year to pass through its the new DSAB systems but it still has “no proof that systems can cope with passenger volumes that existed prior to COVID-19, let alone the 6% annual growth in the volume of passengers” it predicts.

The Home Office has a poor record on delivering technology programmes. Delays to the Emergency Services Network, also a recurring subject of PAC inquiry, are costing taxpayers £650 million a year, and the programme is currently running 6 years late.

PAC says the Home Office has failed to “identify, acknowledge and be transparent about problems” in delivering tech programmes that are “crucial to national security objectives” of protecting the public from terrorism, crime, illegal immigration and trafficking, and also vital for facilitating the legitimate movement of people across the border.

The Home Office failed to address risks and problems that were flagged to the programme board, and false assurances about progress further impeded its responses. The original objective of improved information at the border has now been delayed by a further three years, with little demonstrable lesson learning.

Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Immigration and border security are among the biggest political issues of our time. It is incredible that the Home Office can have failed so badly, for so long, to deliver technology that is crucial to our national security objectives: crucial to protecting the public from terrorism, crime, illegal immigration and trafficking, and crucial to facilitating legitimate movement across the border.

“The Home Office has struggled to get to grips with the technical challenges, resetting the programme and changing the leadership repeatedly. And it is the tax payer hit by both the financial cost and the risks to our security.”

PAC conclusions and recommendations

4. The Department continues to struggle with delivery of technology programmes at staggering cost to the taxpayer. In 2011 the Department abandoned its 2003 initiated e-borders programme having spent at least £340 million on it, as well as £185 million spent on a legal case for cancelling the contract. The delayed delivery of the successor Digital Services at the Border programme has already cost the taxpayer £173 million. Issues with delayed technology delivery in the Department run wider than the DSAB programme. Delays to another of its technology programmes, the Emergency Services Network, are costing taxpayers £650 million a year, and the Department does not plan to end the current system that the Emergency Services Network is meant to replace until 2025, which will be 6 years late. In March 2020 the Department’s entire major project portfolio was rated Red (meaning that it was impossible for it to deliver all its programmes on time and to budget), with Digital Services at the Border and Emergency Services Network being the biggest risks. The Department considers that cultural change is required, along with increasing continuity of leadership for major programmes, having people with the right combination of skills in each role and incentivising all staff to raise problems early to address these issues.

Recommendation: The Permanent Secretary should review the major technology programmes within the Department’s portfolio and write to the Committee within three months with his updated assessment of each programme’s progress and of what impact he expects each programme to have.

5. The Department has failed to identify, acknowledge and be transparent about problems within the Digital Services at the Border programme. Optimism bias about delivery and a failure to be open and transparent about delays left the Department unable to act on accurate information and exposed it to increased costs due to delays in identifying the need to reset the programme. In 2016 the Department made commitments to Parliament that the Digital Services at the Border programme was on track to deliver in 2017. Only in 2019 did the Department accept that it needed to reduce and narrow the scope of the programme to make it more deliverable. The Department put delays and subsequent reduction in scope of the Digital Services at the Border programme down to EU Exit and changes to classification of security data, but it had failed to make any contingency plans for the UK leaving the EU and the changes to classification were in place before the programme started.

Recommendation: The Department should report back to the Committee on:

• its mechanisms for oversight and assurance of delivery and how it knows whether they are working;

• any costs incurred from deviating from the Department’s delivery plans.

6. The Department’s failure to deliver the Digital Services at the Border programme by March 2019 was caused by a lack of effective leadership, management and oversight. The Department accepts that the Digital Services at the Border programme did not achieve value for money up to 2019, with none of the three systems being delivered as planned. It failed to respond to or address risks that were flagged to the programme board. There have been three Accounting Officers and four Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) since the Digital Services at the Border programme began. The Department now expects the Digital Services at the Border programme SRO to focus full-time on seeing the programme through to delivery. The Department claims to have streamlined its oversight and reporting and says that in future it will hold its programme leaders more closely to account for programme delivery.

Recommendation: The Department should set out specifically what it is doing differently in its approach to the DSAB programme to ensure that it is delivered on

time to its revised end March 2022 timetable.

7. The Department has struggled to deliver the core technical components of the Digital Services at the Border programme. The Department has faced repeated problems with the technical aspects of delivery which means it has continued to depend on existing suppliers and extending contracts, with further cost implications. It struggled for several years to find a workable technical solution for storing secret data following the change of data security classification. The Department was also slow to respond to the consequences of EU exit and changes to intelligence requirements. The Department had to suspend its Border Crossing pilot system in March 2020 because it was not stable enough and was only available to frontline staff included in the pilot for 54% of the days it was in operation. The Department has struggled to retain people with the technical skills it requires but tells us it now has a balance between technical and frontline skills with relevant people better able to manage different aspects of the programme.

Recommendation: The Department should set out what it has done to resolve the problems it has had with the technical components of the programme and what it will do if these components are not working as intended to the timescales it has planned.

8. We see a clear risk that the Department will not be able to deliver the programme by the end of March 2022. The Department started its latest rollout of the Border Crossing system on time, but it has so far reached only 300 frontline users at 7 locations out of an intended 7,000 at 56 locations by June 2021. It still has no proof that systems can cope with passenger volumes that existed prior to COVID-19, let alone the 6% annual growth in the volume of passengers it is allowing for above the 140 million people that arrived in the UK annually prior to COVID-19. The Department also plans to include new mobile technology so that Border Force staff covering small ports and airports not included in the Border Crossing rollout will still benefit from the delivery of the Digital Services at the Border programme. Despite recent modest improvements to its risk ratings and achievement against milestones, the Department’s own rating of scope risk was Red as recently as August 2020.

Recommendation: The Department should set out and explain its exact milestones up to overall programme delivery by the end of March 2022 for the main elements of the Digital Services at the Border programme, including Border Crossing, Semaphore, connecting to e-gates and holding secret level data.

9. The Department’s ambitions for the border and its delivery of practical improvements for users depend upon it coordinating the implementation of the Digital Services at the Border programme with the delivery of several related projects. The Department’s aim to provide UK Border Force staff with better information to make decisions about people crossing the border and to track goods entering and exiting the UK depends on it delivering all elements of the new systems on time. It is also reliant on the delivery of other interdependent projects such as e-gates and port infrastructure upgrades to meet this aim. The Department has significant interdependencies to manage with the Data Futures programme to realise the original Digital Services at the Border programme’s objective of better tracking goods entering and exiting the UK.

Recommendation: The Department should set out progress against planned milestones for related programmes, any impacts on frontline Border Force staff and people using border services, and what it is doing to mitigate these impacts.