Home Office e-Borders programme set to cost over £1bn without providing the expected benefits - and officials don't seem to care

The programme is eight years late and is still at least three years away from delivery, says PAC

The Home Office's e-Borders programme will cost more than £1bn, be delivered eight years late, and will still not provide the expected benefits, a damning report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has found.

In 2003, the government decided to launch an e-Borders programme that would be able to track all passengers in and out of Britain within 10 years. US company Raytheon Systems was chosen to design the system in 2007, but had its nine-year contract torn up in 2010 on the grounds that key milestones had been missed.

The Home Office was told to pay £220m to Raytheon over the fiasco, but it appealed and the sum was reduced to £150m, with a further £35m spent on legal costs.

Successor programmes, including the Borders Systems Programme and Digital Services at the Border, took over where Raytheon left off. The Committee said that by March 2015, the Home Office had spent at least £830m on all of these programmes.

But it isn't just the escalating costs associated with e-Borders that concerns the Committee, but also their management. The PAC believes that despite several warnings from the Major Projects Authority about the programme, former and current officials have been "worryingly dismissive that these warnings and concerns suggested fundamental problems".

The PAC is concerned that the Home Office did "not have a clear picture of the management information it has, or needs, to manage the UK border". It found that this, along with constant changes in senior management, has hindered the successful delivery of border programmes.

The Committee did not believe that the Home Office could cope with the challenges, and that it had underestimated the importance of securing the co-operation of other government agencies and transport carriers.

Meg Hillier, chair of the PAC, said that the Committee's report revealed a history of poor management and worrying complacency about its impact on taxpayers.

She said that the completion of the project is essential for the security of the UK's international borders, yet the original target date has long passed, while the programme is still at least three years away from delivery.

"I am careful to say ‘at least' three years from delivery because we are not convinced warnings about the progress of this project have been treated with sufficient gravity, nor that sufficient action has been taken to prevent a repeat of past problems," said Hillier.

She added that these issues were "depressingly familiar" to the Committee, and pointed to the "damaging effects of disjointed leadership and weaknesses in the handling of data" as two of the key problems.

The Committee called for the Home Office to set out, as a matter of urgency, what it expects to deliver in 2016 and who will be responsible for delivering it. It also wanted the department to clarify what data it needs to manage the UK border effectively and when it will be available. The PAC will ask the Home Office to report back to the Committee in January 2017 to lay out what has been achieved.

Back in December, a similarly damning report by the National Audit Office suggested that the e-Borders systems did not share data or analysis effectively.

The e-Borders fiasco is third in Computing's list of the 10 worst-ever government IT projects.