The ESN (Emergency Services Network) project is a classic case of optimism bias in Government, says the the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of MPs in a report; its fourth into the subject.
PAC chair, the London Labour MP Dame Meg Hillier said: “There has never been a realistic plan for ESN and no evidence that it will work as well as the current system. Assertions from the Home Office that it will simply ‘crack on’ with the project are disconnected from the reality, and emergency services cannot be left to pick up the tab for continued delays. With £2 billion already spent on ESN and little to show for it, the Home Office must not simply throw good money after bad.
“A clear direction must of course be established for this long-delayed project, but ESN raises wider issues on the approach to public procurement. The Home Office told our inquiry that it admits the commercial approach taken with ESN is sub-optimal, but will be pursuing it regardless. New risks will be created if it now rushes procurement or delivery as it searches for a replacement main contractor. The risks of outsourcing services must be better managed, as the Government is still accountable for value for money when it does so.”
ESN was featured in the April print edition of Professional Security Magazine after the BAPCO 2023 show in Coventry for public sector comms heard an update. The MPs noted that the emergency services are facing financial pressures as a result with no specific mechanism put in place by Government to help them bear these extra costs.
The Government started the programme to deliver ESN in 2015 and expected to turn off radio system in use Airwave, in 2019. Airwave will eventually (the report suggests by 2028) become obsolete and does not provide users with access to modern mobile data. But the Government still does not know when ESN will be ready and, despite having spent some £2 billion, ESN has not delivered anything substantial, according to the report. The Home Office appears complacent in its confidence that it could reduce the risks to the project, and its optimism appears disconnected from the reality of its performance to date and the challenges ahead, MPs complain. Since the tech firm Motorola’s pulled out of the project, to whom the Home Office estimates it has paid some £140m without the taxpayer getting full value, only limited further progress can be made before the Home Office finds a new supplier, the MPs found. Still to be done are the integrating the various parts of ESN, testing the technology, and getting full enough coverage and resilience.
