PAC: Significant costs to emergency services caused by Home Office failures on communications network

- Home Office appears complacent in its confidence it could reduce risks to programme

- PAC calls for plan with main building blocks of Emergency Services Network by end of year

Significant costs are being created for emergency services by the Government’s failure to deliver their replacement communication network. In a report published today, the Public Accounts Committee finds that, with the delivery of the Emergency Services Network (ESN) facing continued delays, emergency services are facing financial pressures as a result with no specific mechanism put in place by Government to help them bear these extra costs.

The Government started the programme to deliver ESN in 2015 and expected to turn off current system, Airwave, in 2019. Airwave will eventually become obsolete and does not provide users with access to modern mobile data.  But the Government still does not know when ESN will be ready and, despite having spent some £2 billion, ESN has not delivered anything substantial or reduced any risks.

The PAC’s inquiry, its fourth into the delayed programme, looked into how much delays to ESN had cost the emergency services, which have had to pay for additional Airwave devices as a result. ESN transitional costs for the ambulance service amount to £9.5m, while the fire service said it had spent £6m preparing for transition, and £2m on early versions of ESN which now had to be replaced. Police forces estimate that Airwave devices cost £125m since 2018, and expect to spend another £25m by 2026. Forces had spent a further £5m on transition teams. Further costs are inevitable, as current systems will be obsolete in 2028 and may need replacing again before ESN is ready.

The report warns that the Home Office appears complacent in its confidence that it could reduce the risks to the project, and its optimism appears disconnected from the reality of its performance to date and the challenges ahead. Following Motorola’s departure from the project, to whom the Department estimates it has paid some £140m without the taxpayer getting full value, only limited further progress can be made before the Home Office finds a new supplier. Other challenges include integrating the various parts of ESN together, testing the technology, providing the right level of coverage and resilience, and transitioning all emergency services onto the new service.

The PAC is calling on the Government to explore how to help fund the transition to ESN, new Airwave devices and maintaining Airwave for emergency services, as well as producing an outline plan for the main building blocks of ESN by the end of 2023.

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “The ESN project is a classic case of optimism bias in Government. There has never been a realistic plan for ESN and no evidence that it will work as well as the current system. Assertions from the Home Office that it will simply ‘crack on’ with the project are disconnected from the reality, and emergency services cannot be left to pick up the tab for continued delays. With £2 billion already spent on ESN and little to show for it, the Home Office must not simply throw good money after bad.

“A clear direction must of course be established for this long-delayed project, but ESN raises wider issues on the approach to public procurement. The Home Office told our inquiry that it admits the commercial approach taken with ESN is suboptimal, but will be pursuing it regardless. New risks will be created if it now rushes procurement or delivery as it searches for a replacement main contractor. The risks of outsourcing services must be better managed, as the Government is still accountable for value for money when it does so.”

Notes to Editors

• The PAC’s three previous reports into the Emergency Services Network can be found below.
• • ‘Upgrading emergency service communications’, 2017.
  • ‘Upgrading emergency service communications – recall’, 2017.
  • ‘Emergency Services Network: further progress review,’ 2019.

PAC report conclusions and recommendations 

The Department is still far too optimistic about both the progress it has made and the challenges ahead, and therefore risks repeating the same mistakes again. Since 2015 the Department has spent some £2 billion on ESN but has not delivered anything substantial or reduced the many risks. In 2019, we warned that Motorola’s dual role in Airwave and ESN disincentivised it from delivering ESN, and although the Department has taken a necessary decision to replace Motorola, it did not resolve this situation through astute contract management. Instead, it has had to rely on the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) investigating the Airwave contract and on Motorola deciding to leave ESN – a decision which the Department did not seem to anticipate. Were it not for the CMA, Motorola could still be making what the Home Office considered excessive profits from Airwave. The Department continues to say it is confident that it can find a new supplier who can provide the technology that ESN needs, but Motorola was the market leader, and the Department cannot guarantee that a replacement will be able to deliver what is still a complex programme. There are also other delays throughout the programme, which the Department acknowledges is the ‘reddest’ programme in a high-risk portfolio, but the Department appeared complacent in its confidence that it could reduce the risks.

Recommendation 1: The Department should test its confidence in its ability to deliver ESN by having the programme’s Independent Assurance Panel publish an overview of progress and risks once the new user services contract that replaces Motorola is in place.

The Department’s failure to deliver ESN creates a significant cost for the emergency services who must pay to fund ESN and to maintain Airwave for longer. Delays have meant the Department itself has actually spent less than it expected on ESN, but the ultimate users of ESN have had to pay more. The emergency services must contribute, alongside funding from the Department, the Department of Health & Social Care and the Scottish and Welsh governments, to the cost of both ESN and Airwave, and will get no benefit from ESN until Airwave is turned off. Emergency services need to decide how to replace ageing Airwave devices and control rooms, but do not have enough information to know when to do this, because the Department has no timetable for ESN. Emergency services are facing financial pressures and have had to temporarily disband teams who will work on the transition to ESN, risking the loss of vital skills. The Department has not created any specific mechanism for helping emergency services bear the extra costs created by failing to deliver ESN. The CMA has proposed a charge control on Airwave which, once implemented, will make Airwave less expensive to run. But Airwave will still require investment to replace potentially obsolescent infrastructure and technology, and to ensure it keeps operating at its current good performance level. The Department does not yet understand the extent of these costs.

Recommendation 2: As part of the new ESN business case, the Department should explore with users how savings created by the CMA imposing a charge control on Airwave can be used to help fund transition activities and new Airwave devices as well as maintaining Airwave.

The Department cannot yet prove to the emergency services that ESN will be good enough to replace Airwave. There is now a broad consensus among emergency services and the programme’s Independent Assurance Panel that ESN can work and that it remains the right approach. The Department believes that a widening market means ESN can now use off-the-shelf technology, but it is difficult for such a product to fully replicate Airwave, because Airwave is more complex than similar networks in other countries. Because each emergency service will decide for itself whether ESN can replace Airwave, the Department needs robust evidence from rigorous testing to prove that ESN fully meets all the needs of emergency services. Currently the Department does not have an agreed plan for when the different parts of ESN will be ready. Although emergency services are confident that the Department understands their needs, the Department’s past approach to testing ESN has not been good enough, and there is still much left to check, including that coverage is available everywhere it is needed, including in buildings.

Recommendation 3: The Department should set out an outline plan for the main building blocks of ESN by the end of 2023, including when they will be prototyped, built, and tested in real world conditions, and which includes sufficient time for testing by emergency services, and allows feedback to be incorporated into the final version of ESN.

We remain concerned the Department does not have the capability to successfully bring the various elements of ESN together. ESN is a complex programme which was set up using a commercial approach that the Department admits is suboptimal but has decided not to change. Persisting with the same commercial structure means it will still have to contend with the same problems of integrating the work of different suppliers. The software Motorola was delivering must work seamlessly with EE’s network, control room systems provided by an unknown number of vendors, and with devices (in aircraft and vehicles as well as handsets). We have often seen integration cause issues in major programmes, and remain concerned that the Department does not have the skills to make this work effectively. It has previously tried to use contracts to make suppliers responsible for integration or to acquire capabilities, but these approaches have not worked so far.

Recommendation 4: By the time the new user services contract is in place, the Department should obtain an independent opinion on whether ESN has a credible integration plan and the resources in place to deliver it.

It is still not clear how the Department will ensure that there are clearly defined responsibilities or plans in place for operating ESN as a live service, raising questions about whether ESN will provide the intended benefits for the emergency services. The expected benefits from ESN will only materialise if it is run effectively. For example, there will need to be a way of ensuring that any unforeseen consequences of ESN, such the prioritisation of ESN users preventing the public from communicating in an emergency, are appropriately managed. It will take at least 10 years before financial benefits from ESN will recoup the taxpayers’ investment, and widespread use of commercial mobile data by emergency services has already reduced the potential efficiencies that ESN might bring. ESN could still help emergency services to coordinate their responses to major events and standardise approaches to data. The latter will only happen if apps are developed for emergency services to use, but ESN has no current plans to enable this. The Department’s current plans assume it will be responsible for running ESN as a live service, but it has paused work to design a future operating model.

Recommendation 5: As part of the new business case, the Department should create a plan for how it will restart work on how ESN will operate as a live service and ensure the emergency services agree that the future operating model meets their needs.

The Department risks creating a new monopoly supplier in EE, which could reduce long-term value for money. EE provides the main network infrastructure, but although it has made progress extending network coverage, it has not delivered on time, and still has work to complete. The Department has not introduced competition as quickly as it intended and, following previous extensions, it plans to award EE a new contract, again without competition. While the Department remains tied into a single network provider, emergency services cannot benefit from services provided by other operators. The Department claims it will be able to introduce competition later, because all its suppliers are following telecommunications standards, but incompatible assumptions made by different ESN suppliers about which telecommunication standards would be used was one of the issues that led to the 2018 reset.

Recommendation 6: The Department should ensure that the new EE contract for ESN network infrastructure includes sufficient protection against EE making excessive profits and requires all infrastructure to fully comply with telecommunications standards and allows other network suppliers can be introduced in future if they are better value./ENDS

Full inquiry info including evidence received can be found here - Emergency Services Network - Committees - UK Parliament