U.K. Home Office Accepted £71m Faulty IT System, Data

Atlas, meant to automate asylum, citizenship and visa applications, has been causing serious delays and errors with a series of bizarre glitches, some seen as critical incidents, according to news website 'i'

A £71 million IT system that the United Kingdom Home Office has been running is faulty and producing glitchy data but the department has just accepted them, the country’s former chief immigration inspector was cited as saying.

David Neal, sacked as the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration in February, told "i" how concerned he was about the department’s handling of its malfunctioning Atlas casework system.

His comments follow an investigation by i which revealed that Atlas, meant to automate asylum, citizenship and visa applications, has instead been causing serious delays and errors with a series of bizarre glitches, some seen as critical incidents, according to the article.

i said it had left NHS staff unable to start work, slowed down operations against illegal immigrants, and kept children waiting for as long as 21 months for British citizenship.

The symptoms of Atlas problems were seen across a wide spectrum of work on visas, asylum and foreign offenders, Neal was cited as saying.

He told the BBC earlier this month that the Home Office is dysfunctional and in urgent need of reform. That was the most senior independent voice with detailed knowledge of the Home Office to publicly criticise its handling of migration in recent times, according to the BBC.

The government sacked him last month, saying he had leaked confidential information, after he told journalists of his concerns that the Border Force was failing to carry out proper security checks on private jets.

Neal told i that the Home Office was aware that the backdrop of Atlas was not very good, the data was awful, and so workarounds had to be frequently introduced.

The Home Office told i that Atlas was in its early stages of testing and roll-out in 2021 and that substantial changes have been made to improve data quality since then.

Neal said he was not aware of any discussion of pausing the roll-out of Atlas, which began in 2019, or making substantial changes to the way it worked. He was still finding problems with the system in a report last year.

It is such a big issue and it’s just accepted, he told i. Atlas is fundamental to everyone working in the immigration area, he was cited as saying.

He said he had repeatedly warned of a wider issue of “inexcusably awful” data-gathering and handling inside the Home Office, which was affecting operations across the full spectrum of its work.

According to the website, published government contracts showed that £71 million has been spent on Atlas since 2019, but the real cost is believed to be far higher because the system is part of a wider immigration platform technologies programme.

An accounting assessment in September 2022, which was not made public until January this year, said the programme had cost £406 million since 2014 and another £66 million was expected to be spent through to completion, according to the website.

The Home Office spokesperson said that since 2021 substantial changes have been made to improve data quality, user experience, and caseworking productivity across multiple application types. This has ensured a more efficient, accurate and comprehensive U.K. immigration system which processes over a million cases each year, the website cited the spokesperson as saying.