back to article Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

The UK Home Office has added £336m to the cost of running its border management IT systems as delays and uncertainty continue to dog the programme, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). In July 2019, the government department decided to reset the project to update and replace vital systems supporting cross-border …

  1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    As it said on the bus

    We send £350m a week to the Eu, lets fund IBM instead

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: As it said on the bus

      That damn bus. Is there a Godwin's Law specifically for Brexit?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: As it said on the bus

        Oh dear, do you want us to forget about the bus? We aren't going to. Despite the (no doubt Scummings' "genius") plan to obscure it from Google searches for "Boris Bus" by the laughable fiction that Johnson relaxes in his spare time by painting old wine crates ... I think this is the principle weakness of the Right* - they think we're all as dim as they are.

        *I don't mean ordinary proper conservatives like me, I mean the radical idealogues who seem to have forgotten everything that Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk ever said.

      2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Thumb Down

        "That damn bus. Is there a Godwin's Law specifically for Brexit?"

        No.

        Because a lot of the fools who voted for this bu***hit believed what they thought was promised on the side of the bus (It was only a "what if," so not a total lie. Cummins is quite bright like that).

        Let's see the govt actually deliver on it.

        So far they've delivers about 6 weeks of EU payments.

        Where's the other 46 "Boris"?

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      Re: As it said on the bus

      They are funding their school chum's companies, Their "Easy Brexit" has made them a lot of money.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge

        Their "Easy Brexit" has made them a lot of money.

        Yeah, funny how that works is it not?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: As it said on the bus

      "We send £350m a week to the Eu, lets fund IBM instead"

      If you think we wouldn't have been funding IBM anyway, I suspect you are being very optimistic.

      Unless you consider sending the money to one of Crapita/Crapgemini/Abunchoftossers/Fushitsu/HoPeless/Accenturd the better option.

      Note: And no...I don't consider IBM or HoPeless the better options - it's just a lack of imagination on my part that prevents me coming up with faecal matter equivalents...

  2. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    The overly entitled but under skilled and shambolic residents of recent and successive UK Government cabinet departments don't actually have to "earn" the cash, so why take any responsibility for spending it... err... responsibly.

    Other than the odd haranguing from the PAC they don't give a sh*t.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      John Reid (remember him?) said the HO was not fit for purpose. That was a long time ago. Nothing seems to have changed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        A lot has changed.

        I think they have reduced the average Home Secretary career from 4 years down to under 2 through incompetence or "accidentally" doing something embarassing.

        1. BebopWeBop

          May combined a longish career in the HO with a rather phartish collapse in her new role. But she was unfailingly polite in the HO when we were providing services which is more than can be said of subsequent cretins.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Meh

        John Reid (remember him?) said the HO was not fit for purpose. That was a long time ago. Nothing seems to have changed.

        It depends on what the purpose of the Home Office is.

        Put it this way, did Theresa May's six years in charge of the Home Office and its serial disasters, boost or harm her subsequent career prospects?

      3. Halfmad

        and he's missed..

        One of the few politicians who'd just say it as it was.

        He also said no sane person would plan the NHS to be as it is and the only way to reorganise it is to scrap it and start again to make it fit for the modern era, anything else is moving chairs as insane expense.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    I'm sure it'll be dwarfed by the extras once the new system gets rolled out.

    1. Dwarf
      Joke

      @Doctor Syntax

      So, what's that supposed to mean then ,, huh,, huh ... :-)

      You make it sound like being dwarfed is a bad thing .. some people will disagree with you, some even enjoyed it..

    2. codejunky Silver badge

      @Doctor Syntax

      I saw the figure and thought it a bit cheap for a government overspend. Probably a sign of more to come

  4. cornetman Silver badge

    God, if we could just all get along, agree that duties and excise is just a really awful way to raise funds, we could avoid all this bother and expense and just have no borders.

    As a race, we certainly do know how to make things bloody difficult for ourselves.

    1. MatthewSt

      Easy tiger, next you'll be telling us that we should be able to live and work in other countries too!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    British borders have always been a mess

    The continuous shambles of the UK border are really a sight to behold.

    I don't know whether it's because the UK is an island that it never thought to take much care of its borders or whether it makes the disgrace even greater that, despite GB being an island, the UK never really managed to control its borders. It's as if nobody realised that for easily 75 years most people entering or leaving the UK come by plane instead of a rowing boat.

    Take the absence of exit checks until pretty recently. An old university friend of mine was stationed as a police liaison officer in Turkey for years on behalf of a European country I won't name. This was during the war in Syria and because said country is an EU member state he would also take cases from other EU member states, including the UK. Quite a bit of his work involved instructing the interception of people from EU countries who tried to join in the war effort in a less official capacity. For most countries he'd get an alert along the lines of "Individual X, who has been on a list of people we have some concerns about, has just arrived at Frankfurt Airport/Milan-Malpensa/Schiphol Airport/Paris-Charles de Gaulle, about to board a plane to Istanbul. We think they might be travelling onwards to join IS. Can you intercept?"

    Quite often these people could be picked off a bus to Gaziantep, Diyarbakır, or any other town that is better known for being conveniently close to the Syrian border than as tourist destination. Except for the Brits. The lack of exit checks in the UK meant that quite often Turkish police would pick up some British chap near the Syrian border before UK security services had even noticed that a person on a watch list had left the country. He was stationed in Ankara during the "Bethnal Green Trio" journey to Syria, something he could not prevent. It caused him a great amount of frustration.

    An acquaintance of mine entered the country during the first lockdown, despite almost all international travel being banned, because if you have money there's always a way.

    I have long wondered what the problem is with the UK and borders and it's undoubtedly multifactorial. There's obviously the usual massive IT scheme that needs to do too much. There is also the typical institutional incompetence that we are used to. There is, however, also a political dimension to it if you ask me. A fundamental misunderstanding about what is real and what isn't. What is hard and what isn't. How border control is not something that just takes place at that row of booths at the airport. *

    I know UK politicians like to think that they have deliberately kept the UK out of the Schengen agreement. I often wonder whether the Schengen countries would have accepted the UK as a member. Schengen is all about borders, strengthening borders and harmonising borders because members are essentially outsourcing their border control to another Schengen member. The French need to trust the Dutch to control entrance at Schiphol Airport. The Dutch need to trust the Poles to control entrance at the border with Ukraine etc. etc. Would the French, the Dutch or the Poles trust the UK with controlling borders on their behalf? I doubt it.

    And now, on 1 January, the UK Border Force will lose access to the Schengen Information System. Not just a casualty of Brexit but also of the loss of trust in the UK because it was found to have illegally copied database entries and given it to Americans. Was anyone jailed for that? Of course not. The loss of access to SIS means that a Border Force agent will get no warning that the passport of the Danish chap at his booth is actually reported stolen, or that Massimo travelling to London for business is actually wanted for fraud in his native Italy.

    We're actually going backwards when it comes to border security and I don't know if and when that's ever going to reverse.

    * Nothing against the Border Force people staffing the booths at airports. It's not their fault they don't get the tools they need.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: British borders have always been a mess

      Schengen is all about borders, strengthening borders and harmonising borders

      And fattening of borders - Under Schengen, the customs officers can do customs inpections all the way to the destination of people or goods, they can basically follow them. If they deem it neccesary.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: British borders have always been a mess

        That is correct. A border between Schengen members actually extends 30 km (If I recall correctly) to either side and routine customs operations can take place anywhere in that 60 km zone. It's just based on risk profiles and sampling instead of 100% checks.

        Also, none of that stuff you see in American films where a crook escapes across a state line and the police can't follow them. Police in Schengen member states can actually chase fleeing bank robbers and the like across the border, within reason. Typically until the national police of that country have taken over the chase.

        – the original AC

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: British borders have always been a mess

      This is genuinely enlightening.

      I was in discussion with Raytheon to lead the Systems Engineering side of e-Borders - that all fell apart when they fell out with the Home Office. I asked some very basic questions about the problems they were trying to solve (simple top-level user requirements / capabilities) and it was absolutely clueless. No idea how it would work, who would be linked up, what it was trying to do. This was on both the Home Office and Raytheon side.

      But Raytheon were already completing two data centres.

      And that's how these things go - any decent engineer would flag up the complexity and need to understand what you're really trying to do, but building a stack-load of infrastructure looks like progress. That's always the easy part. The difficult part is solving as much of the business need as possible.

      1. BebopWeBop

        Re: British borders have always been a mess

        I understand your pain. I was consulting with HP (we provided a decent service) to analyse the requirements and costs at the time - a shambles.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: British borders have always been a mess

        With regards to the outsourcing, I am slightly suspicious about the process of choosing the outsourcing partner. Why choose an American defence contractor for border systems? Do they have experience of developing these systems or was it just the garden variety of A very British Corruption where a cousin of the cabinet minister just happens to sit on their board?

        I fear that to some extent there is a variation of the NIH syndrome playing a role. Why not have a look at who built the system for the French, or the Danes, or the Italians, or the Irish? Are they happy with their system? What works and what doesn’t? Can large elements just be mirrored outright? Why not work backwards and look at already functioning systems in other countries and then employ the people who built that. Somehow I suspect that that is not how they approached this.

        I do, however, feel that the actual contractor is not the core of the issue. You can have the best contractor in the world, if you give them a shoddy brief or muddled thinking they will still fail. And that is why I think the actual source of the issue is direction from above, politicians and civil service.

        I feel there is a serious misunderstanding about what borders can and can’t do. What they should and should not do. It’s not a problem that can’t be solved, there are plenty of countries in the world that have quite well functioning borders. It’s time to sort out the actual ‘business needs’.

        For starters, there is the mistaken belief that the people who staff the border booths play a role in immigration. That is nonsense, they don’t have the tools for that, largely because those tools do not exist, and will not exist until computers can read minds. It’s even an institutionalised mistake in that you could see giant letters spelling out ‘Immigration’ at airports when their role in immigration is minimal.

        Contrary to what the word ‘immigration’ suggests, immigration is in most cases not about who is entering the country but about who is not leaving the country. Over a billion people have visa free (meaning they are not vetted before they try to enter the country) access to Britain, for historical reasons (commonwealth and all that) or because we have other agreements with their countries (EU, US). A Border Force agent sitting in a border booth has no way of knowing for certain whether that man, woman and two children who show up at their booth are entering the country to see some Harry Potter theme park and will fly back home after ten days or whether they intend to never leave.

        That means that, essentially, you don’t know whether someone has immigrated until you know that they did not leave. Hence the need for exit checks.

        You can, of course, block people from entering the country altogether if you want to reduce immigration. That would, however, kill business, tourism (the contribution of the UK’s tourism industry to GDP is 11%, a similar percentage as in Spain) and the higher education sector. Nobody, except perhaps a delusional obsessive like Theresa May, would suggest that.

        This means that if you want to control immigration you need to introduce exit checks first and after that focus on where immigration really takes place: not at the border.

        I am no fan of Theresa “deport the voiceless” May. I think she is a racist and a xenophobe (if you don’t believe me, ask her fellow cabinet ministers and special advisors, many of of whom felt quite uncomfortable around some of her opinions) but under her six years at the Home Office they did finally understand one thing. That is that immigration takes place long after a border passage. Immigration takes place when someone decides not to leave.

        That produced the awfully named ‘Hostile Environment’ and some of its malicious elements. In the core, though, it did focus on the right question. If you democratically decide that people who meet a certain condition can stay in the country whereas people who don’t meet it can’t stay, there should also be a practical difference in what people can and can’t do. People who don’t meet the criteria to stay should not be able to work legally for instance.

        This has all sorts of practical implications and room for failure in execution (for instance, giving a group of people the right to stay and work in the country but refusing to give them documentation to prove it to prospective employers) but the direction stems from a principle. The principle of not making life easy for people who should not stay in the country is a core of controlling immigration, much more than any border system ever will.

        That was immigration and the very limited role (mainly exit checks) that borders play in it. Now let’s look at security.

        We know UK security services have people on various watch lists. Lists ranging from ‘Is said to have some dubious interests’ to ‘Is planning a terrorist attack imminently’. We also know, from previous terrorist attacks and two minutes of serious thought, that it’s impossible to follow every single person on a watch list 24/7. A single person would probably require five people for round the clock actual watching. With many thousands of people on these lists that is simply impossible. The very least you would then like to know, as a security service, is that person X on a certain watch list has left the country via a ferry terminal in Dover, or quite possibly an international flight at Heathrow. You can then probably easily find out that it looks pretty harmless (Ibiza) or pretty risky (Gaziantep). Another point for exit checks.

        Obviously, exit checks can also play a role in non-terrorist related issues. It’s quite useful to know that that chap that’s trying to leave the country via Heathrow is actually wanted in Scotland in relation to a murder. Or has an unpaid tax bill of £250,000.

        Lastly, and that is where border security IT systems can really shine, is information about the person standing at the booth when they enter the country. It’s helpful to know that that chap at the booth is flying in and out of the UK a couple of times a month and is therefore more likely engaged in business travel than holiday making. Exit checks.

        It also helps to have information, preferably real time look ups, about the validity of their passport or whether they are on a wanted or missing persons list. This sort of data can come from own sources but will mainly need to come through international cooperation. From the Schengen Information System, from Europol, from Interpol, from Five Eyes, from Nine Eyes, from Fourteen Eyes etc. Plugging in external systems is not always easy and it’s just as important to remove imported data when it becomes outdated (the Interpol system is notorious for being slow to remove people from the list, causing abuse by some countries) as it is to have additions as soon as they take place.

        Now, the UK has come a long way in exit checks. A few years ago I noticed they started UK exit checks at the St Pancras Eurostar terminal where previously it was only the French that took an interest. There are still quite a few holes on this island, which I won’t name, but some progress is being made.

        Mind you, all of the above talks about people, not goods. Goods is an entirely different kettle of fish with many different moving parts and considerations (you can’t easily keep people waiting at a border booth for hours, you can with goods) and all the coming Brexit disruption is about goods, not people.

        – the original AC

        1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
          Unhappy

          " Why not have a look at who built the system for the French, or the Danes, or the Italians,

          or the Irish? "

          I would. But I suspect the HO has a similar attitude to the MoD to such systems.

          That "What we do is sooooo special no OTS system (even one built for the task and used by [i]several[/i] other countries) could [i]possibly[/i] do what we need it to."

          I sometimes suspect this is because the senior nappy put in charge of getting the new system has no actual idea [i]what[/i] the current system does (starting with what other systemes it has to talk to for it to work at all) and hopes the con-sultants and con-tractors will just "make it so" to coin a phrase.

    3. onemark03

      Re: British borders have always been a mess

      The UK could usefully let us Kiwis sort out its border worries. We check people in and out.

      We're an island nation as well and our systems are state-of-the art so no-one gets past us. We'd sort the UK out no worries.

  6. Howard Sway Silver badge

    It had been available for 54 per cent of the days it was in live operation

    Yes, but it's almost reached "nine fives" level availability (55.5555555%), and I'm sure I heard that that's what's considered reliable these days.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It had been available for 54 per cent of the days it was in live operation

      Conveniently, "nine fives" is almost exactly "five ninths". I've often thought it was just a careful mispronunciation.

  7. steviebuk Silver badge

    They have

    Hired overpriced consultants. Who'll have sat in an office and covered the wall with postit notes with their ideas. They'll never talk to the people that actually use the software. Develop a tiny part of it and then be told by the people that use it "Thats not how the process works".

    Seen it all before. A hipster director with no clue leading a team of consultants with no clue. Who are asked to leave a year later having producing nothing yet still getting paid.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They have

      That does happen.

      What happens more frequently is Civil Servants, way out of their depth, procure extraordinarily expensive systems with no responsibility. In the Civil Service, the bigger the project, the better it looks on your CV and up the ranks you go. There is an incentive to spend as much as possible and move on. I've seen some stunning wastes of cash, mainly in defence, that make e-borders look like amateurs.

      And don't get me started on the concept of a third party 'customer friend'. Thats a self-licking lollipop idea if ever I've seen one.

      1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

        Dear Santa

        I used to have a desk near a person responsible for the physical infrastructure of my company (that's the buildings, sheds, huts etc. not the IT). I lost count of the the number of times I heard him say over the phone:

        "If only they'd spoken to the people doing the work for the last 3 years* this would never have happened."

        *or 6 months, or decade, or basically almost any period of time from 20 years to 3 months.

        Senior management consultants simply do not talk to the plebs, they talk to the senior managers who think they run things, rather than the people who actually do run things.

        It would be nice, once in a while, to have a report of a major HMG IT procurement which actually met its sensible requirements, on time and too budget. I'd better write my letter to Father Christmas for that one though. (Ho, Ho, Ho.)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dear Santa

          Quote -

          It would be nice, once in a while, to have a report of a major HMG IT procurement which actually met its sensible requirements, on time and too budget.

          Spelling aside, will this one do?

          https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/10/met_office_super_nine_times_boost_bbq/

          A/C due to insider knowledge

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They have

      What usually happens is that the government civil servants often product a 110 page+ list of requirements, that aren't prioritised, qualified and are purely a wish list of shit.

      In all the government projects I've been on since 2004 till 2016, they were like that. It's one of the reason's I no longer want to do government contracts anymore.

      1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

        Re: They have

        "civil servants often product a 110 page+ list of requirements, that aren't prioritised, qualified and are purely a wish list of shit."

        And on one bid they would delete some of the requirements every now and then, and then change the numbers of all subsequent requirements so as to use consecutive numbers. the amount of re-work required to keep up was ridiculous. The 'consultants' 'managing' the bid for the Department point-blank refused to just list requirement numbers as 'no longer used.

  8. jason 7

    It doesn't matter to them.

    My other half worked for the Govt for a month. Her job was to monitor projects and their progress. She would visit the managers of said projects and they would be sat at their desk doing sudoku or reading the golfing times whatever.

    They were genuinely surprised to see her asking about the projects. Over and over she was told "look it's a govt project, no one cares, we will just file a report right at the end, nothing will happen...and after all, it's only taxpayers money!"

    That's why she quit after a month. It wasn't going to get any better. That and her boss was a creep who was up on three HR disputes with other female staff.

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