The Home Office spent at least £830m between 2003 and 2015 on the e-borders programme and its successors, and has so far failed to deliver, according to a report from the National Audit Office.
In November 2007, the Department entered a contract with Raytheon, a US-based technology and defence company, to implement its e-borders. The Department terminated this in July 2010 citing a failure to deliver. This was followed by a protracted legal dispute, settled out of court in March 2015. The NAO report finds that the Department spent over £340m between 2006-7 and 2010-11 on the e-borders, a further £150m on the settlement with Raytheon and £35m on legal costs. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15, the Department spent £303m on the successor programmes.
With this spend, the Department has developed new capabilities to receive and analyse data on those travelling to and from the UK. By 2010, the e-borders had built a new centre staffed by people from the Department, police and the National Crime Agency. However, the quantity of data analysed is less than planned with information provided on 86pc of passengers travelling to the UK in September 2015 compared to a target of 95pc by December 2010.
The Department has not yet built an integrated system and processes are therefore inefficient, according to the auditors, with the Home Office unable to fully exploit the potential of the data it is receiving. Current processes include extensive manual effort, duplication of effort, and restrict the use that can be made of travel history records. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15, the Department spent £89m improving systems that e-borders should have replaced and information about travellers is still being processed on two systems that do not share data or analysis effectively.
The report finds several reasons for the failure to deliver. The Department has lacked a consistent strategy or realistic plan for delivery. According to the NAO, the delivery plans for e-borders were too ambitious to be achievable in the timeframe and the Department has struggled to decide how to take the vision forward since the cancellation of the e-borders contract. The Home Office also under-estimated the importance of stakeholders. It made unrealistic assumptions about delivery without recognising the importance of managing a diverse range of more than 600 stakeholders. By 2015, however, there were signs of an improved relationship with plane, ferry and rail carriers.
The auditors also point to an inability to make decisions due to gaps in capability and resourcing. The NAO found that there have been eight programme directors on e-borders and successor programmes between 2003 and 2015. The NAO finds that the Department has a culture that does not demand and use high quality data. The Department has only had measures of data quality in place for the information it receives on travellers since 2014 and these measures are limited in what they cover. The NAO also identified gaps in the management information used by the Department, including poor information on the number of people checked at the border and poor information on the effectiveness of processes.
The NAO report does find, however, that changes since late 2014 give some cause for optimism with particular improvements in leadership and stakeholder management.
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The e-borders programme began in 2003, with an ambition which has remained largely unchanged in the intervening years. It was due to have been completed in 2011. Since we are now in 2015, with the Home Office still not having delivered the original vision after expenditure of £830 million, I cannot view e-borders as having delivered value for money. Some valuable capabilities have been added to our border defences during the life of this project, though their efficiency is impaired by a failure to replace old IT systems.”
In 2014-15, 118 million people travelled to the UK and roughly the same number left. In 2003 UK border controls relied primarily on systems and procedures that operated at the border itself. In the early 2000s there was a growing realisation in the UK and elsewhere of the need to do more checks before people arrived in the country, and ideally before they left their point of origin. Hence that setting up of the e-borders programme.
