Government sued by Motorola over unpaid emergency services bills

Airwave continues to create problems decades later

Government sued by Motorola over unpaid emergency services bills

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Government sued by Motorola over unpaid emergency services bills

Motorola is suing the Home Office, claiming that the bills for running the police radio network have been underpaid since March 2023.

The legal action is just the latest in a long line of disputes over the proprietary Airwave secure communications system and its costs that go back to the birth of the project in 2000.

According to court documents acquired by the Daily Telegraph, Motorola claims that the Home Office "has failed to pay the full amounts of the charges due… in relation to invoices". The claims were filed last month, with Motorola suggesting that the Home Office had failed to pay additional costs linked to inflation.

Motorola is demanding £13.5 million, plus interest amounting to around £1 million. The Home Office, meanwhile claims that "all invoices issued in respect of charges from 2021 onwards are incorrect".

Motorola's legal claim is just the latest in a long-running series of disputes over Airwave, culminating in a complaint to the Competition & Markets Authority in 2021. It found that Motorola had abused its monopoly position to drive up the prices that emergency services had no choice but to pay.

"Our investigation showed that Motorola held all the cards when it came to pricing. With no other providers in the market, our fire, police, and ambulance services had no choice but to pay the rates set by Motorola – meaning they paid almost £200 million a year more than they would have if the market was working well," according to Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts that conducted investigation.

The CMA therefore capped the amount that Motorola is able to charge for use of the Airwave network.

The Airwave service should have been fully replaced five years ago with a system based on 4G technology, dubbed the Emergency Services Network (ESN). It had been scheduled to be phased in between 2017 and 2019, when the Airwave contract was due to expire. The idea of ESN is to migrate from a proprietary system to existing commercial networks, cutting costs in the process.

That programme, however, has been subject to overruns and delays, including the need to remove Huawei hardware from the system.

Doubts about Airwave, meanwhile, go back 24 years to the very start of the project, with doubts about security and rocketing costs reported by Computing as far back as 2000.

Dogged with claims of high costs, in 2014 government CTO Liam Maxwell claimed that the network was costing around £450 million per year to run when a better system based on modern technology should cost just £70 million.

Airwave, meanwhile, has been passed round from company to company. It was established by BT in 2000 as BT Airwave to provide a professional mobile radio communications network to the police and other emergency services. BT Airwave was contracted to provide the infrastructure as part of a public-private partnership contract in a contract valued at £2.5 billion.

The unit was subsequently spun-out of BT as part of the BT Cellnet divestiture that became O2 in 2002, and spun-out of O2 five years later with its acquisition by private equity in the form of Macquarie Group, an Australian financial services group that also bought and sold Thames Water, loading it up with debt in the process.

Motorola Solutions, meanwhile, completed the acquisition of Airwave in February 2016, but was subsequently accused of hiking fees.