Home Office e-borders systems 'do not share data or analysis effectively', claims NAO report

£150m lobbed at Raytheon over e-borders project fiasco - with £35m spent by the Home Office on legal costs

The ill-fated Home Office e-borders project, intended to improve the UK's border security, is based on two systems that are not properly integrated.

That is one of the conclusions of the National Audit Office (NAO) report released this morning. Furthermore, it revealed, the settlement with Raytheon - who had been unceremoniously sacked in 2010 for project failings - cost some £150m, with £35m also spent on legal costs by the Home Office.

Raytheon had been procured to deliver the e-borders vision in November 2007, and dumped in July 2010 over a "failure to deliver against milestones".

Between 2003 and 2015, the Home Office spent "at least" £830m on the e-borders programme and its successor projects, "delivering some valuable new capabilities but failing to deliver the full vision", according to the report.

Yet the two key systems at the centre of the e-borders project still don't integrate and share data effectively, revealed the report: "By 2010, the e-borders programme had built a centre, staffed by people from the department, police and National Crime Agency, to analyse passenger data received in advance, and issue notifications to staff working at the border.

"However, these data were, and remain to this day, processed on two systems that do not share data or analysis effectively. The e-borders contract had expected that these systems would be replaced by April 2011 and following the termination of that contract the department prioritised improving the resilience and reliability of these systems.

"Relying on legacy systems means that current processes involve extensive manual effort, duplication of effort and restrictions on the use that can be made of travel history records."

The report made a number of damning conclusions over the competence of the Home Office in running such projects. It said that while the Home Office had a "consistent vision" for the programme, its strategy was lacking and that it needed a more realistic plan for implementing it.

It also suggested that the Home Office failed to manage "a large number of stakeholders well", had inadequate staffing arrangements and that it did not have a culture that valued high-quality data highly enough.

After the dispute between the Home Office and Raytheon went to arbitration the Home Office was ordered to pay £220m in compensation. The Home Office appealed, and the sum was reduced to £150m.