The Home Office has shortlisted four consortia for the £400m eBorders scheme, Computing can exclusively reveal.

Groups led by BT, EDS, Raytheon and T-Systems will go to the next stage of the competition to develop a system to link government agencies, travel industry systems and transport hubs. CSC and Fujitsu are out of the race.

eBorders is due to be up and running by 2010. It will log the details of everyone entering or leaving the country, check passenger details against government systems and grant or deny permission to enter the UK before travellers leave foreign soil.

The scheme is central to Labour’s security commitment. In a speech last week, Chancellor Gordon Brown said that Project Semaphore, the eBorders pilot, checked the details of six million passengers last year, and led to 140 arrests.

eBorders is one of a series of major government IT schemes scheduled for the near future.

Many large IT suppliers are already heavily committed in the public sector – BT to the £6bn NHS scheme and EDS to the £4bn Defence Information Infrastructure, for example – prompting questions about the capacity of the supplier market to bid for, and deliver, so many huge, high-risk programmes concurrently.

‘We are expecting ID card procurement to start this year so the issues around capacity may well come up,’ said Nick Kalisperas, government programme director for supplier body Intellect.

‘We have confidence the industry will deliver on its commitments, but it is imperative that the government ensures the procurements are run effectively and do not incur unnecessary costs in either time or resources.’

The consortia bidding for eBorders are the BT Emblem group, including Lockheed Martin, LogicaCMG and HP; the EDS-led Aztec consortium with Atos Origin and Northrop Grumman; and the Raytheon-led Trusted Borders group, which includes Accenture, Detica and Serco. There are no details available about T-Systems’ subcontractors.

Georgina O’Toole, analyst at Ovum, says that defence suppliers such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are increasingly likely to emerge in bids for more general public sector programmes.

‘Defence contractors are moving into the IT space as they will need other ways to increase revenues as the Ministry of Defence moves away from major equipment schemes,’ she said.