Transparency data

6 September 2022: Immigration Platform Technologies (IPT) Programme accounting officer assessment

Updated 21 November 2024

Summary

It is normal practice for Accounting Officers to scrutinise significant policy proposals or plans to start or vary major projects, and then assess whether they measure up to the standards set out in Managing Public Money. From April 2017, the government has committed to make a summary of the key points from these assessments available to Parliament when an Accounting Officer has agreed an assessment of projects within the Government’s Major Projects Portfolio.

This Accounting Officer Assessment considers the IPT programme on approval of its Full Business Case through to completion.

Immigration Platform Technologies (IPT) is the foundation technology platform for all of the UK’s Visa and Immigration systems. It is critical to the delivery of both an effective regular migration service as well as the ongoing transformation of asylum caseworking. IPT is delivering 3 integrated modern technology services that together ensure the ongoing delivery of a visa and immigration system for the UK, which are cheaper to operate than those they replace, and which:

1. Provide a strategic, maintainable, and extendable platform for the immigration service for the next Spending Review and beyond, limiting the need for significant programme expenditure in future.

2. Take large volumes of paper out of the system.

3. Prevent errors being made in the completion of applications.

4. Support a more consistent decision-making process.

5. Support electronic documents.

6. Provide supported decision-making functionality.

7. Reduce handling costs, improve processing speed and increase reliability

The three new technology solutions are:

• Access UK – Accessed via GOV.UK, this single online application service for all visa and immigration services allows our customers to complete their application, book an appointment, and pay for their service. It has taken large volumes of paper out of the system and integrates with Atlas, the caseworking system, preventing errors being made in the completion of applications. The Department uses Access to provide application services to all our core immigration routes including building emergency routes for crisis events such as Ukraine or Afghanistan.
• Atlas – This modern, resilient system is now the core immigration caseworking tool for HO. Atlas supports electronic documents, thereby taking significant amounts of paper out of the system. Because of increased automation, there are reduced handling costs, improved speed of processing and increased reliability of service.
• Person Identity Product – The Person Identity Product (PIP) is now the unified provider of all person related data services for Immigration Technology, showing the historic case information, co-ordinating the recording of Person & Identity related data, searching for an individual’s details, matching associated data and presenting data back to the end user.

IPT has also delivered the Person Centric Data Platform (PCDP) that is a central storage platform for all person-centred data for Migration and Borders, which includes historic data from legacy systems and all new data from migration and borders applications.

In June 2019 a review of the outstanding risks to the delivery of IPT identified that the migration of existing Data Services and Management Information was not accounted for. As a result, this was added to the scope of the IPT programme, and the overall cost of the programme was increased along with the timescales for delivery.

IPT is ensuring the on-going functioning of the UK immigration system by replacing the technology that previously underpinned the system, but which has become outdated.

This assessment is made against the Full Business Case approved by the Home Office Finance and Investment Committee on the 21st of July 2022. At this point IPT have already delivered: Access UK to its original scope, Person Identity Product, decommissioned all but one of the component parts of the old system, and have delivered most of the functionality required in Atlas, such that it is used by over 30,000 users. The work that remains is to complete the delivery of Atlas functionality, migrate the users fully to Atlas and decommission the last legacy component.

Access UK, Atlas and Person Identity Product are also being enhanced by other programmes within the Migration and Borders portfolio and will continue to be updated as part of Continuous Improvement throughout their lifecycle.

Regularity

The Programme does not require new or amended legislation to progress. The Programme relies on the Data Protection Act and Article 6(1) of the GDPR to process personal data for immigration functions. I therefore consider it to conform to the Regularity Accounting Officer standard.

Propriety

The new IT components incorporate Government policies on immigration, are adjusted as these policies are updated and are agnostic of protected characteristics. Legacy systems were already administered to public sector standards. The administration and use of their replacement will be no less compliant and due to an increased ability to continuously improve the new components the administration is expected to be to a higher standard.

IPT is funded out of a wider allocation of capital and resource change budgets in the Migration and Borders Mission. The Mission continues to manage spending across that portfolio to maximise outcomes while remaining within Spending Review 2021 (SR21) spending limits and conforming with controls set out in Managing Public Money and the HMT Green Book. The Programme has approval to spend for £50 million in FY 2022/23, the £15 million in FY 2023/24 will be considered as part of the internal allocation process.

Appropriate governance is in place to ensure that spend is monitored and well managed, risks to delivery are identified and mitigated as appropriate and that spend is in line with IPT’s and the wider department’s objectives.

IPT is affordable with the Whole Life Cost currently forecast to be £472.16m.

All contracts awarded to support the delivery of the programme have been let through open and fair means, with the support of the Home Office Commercial team.

Given the importance of maintaining the UKs borders and having a fully functioning modern visa and immigration system to do this, it is imperative that IPT completes its delivery. Therefore, I consider the programme to conform to the Propriety Accounting Officer standard.

Value for Money

Value for money assessments are carried out at each project stage to satisfy approval requirements in line with Home Office governance arrangements. The latest of these assessments with a net present value for completing the programme of £25.7m to March 2023 demonstrate that completing the IPT programme continues to be the best value for money option.

The overall timescale and costs for IPT have increased since the programme’s inception in 2014. Sunk costs up until 1st April 2022 are £406.4m with expected costs of £65.76m through to completion. The costs in 2022/23 are £50m (£27.19m CDEL and £22.81m RDEL) and £15.76m for 2023/24 (£7.51m CDEL and £8.25m RDEL).

The timescales and costs have increased over the life of IPT for a number of reasons including EU Exit, Ukraine and Afghanistan all of which took priority over staff and test resources that IPT required; Covid 19 that impacted the rollout and necessitated new functionality to support remote capture of biometrics; other new programmes such as Future Border and Immigration System taking priority and increases in scope to deliver Data Services and Management Information.

The IPT Programme currently tracks benefits for Customer Services, Immigration Enforcement (IE) and IT Cost Savings. There’s an expected IT cost saving of £3.7 million in 2024/2025 and annually for the rest of the appraisal period from the decommissioning of CID. An expected £2.5 million of annual monetised benefits in IE, increasing to £4.4 million from 2024/2025 onwards. There may also be some additional non-monetised benefits across from other commands and £0.5 million of annual benefits for Customer Services from 2022/2023 onwards. This amounts to total expected benefits of £216.4m.

The new capabilities delivered by IPT will improve efficiency through driving automation and reducing manual processes, and facilitate improved data transparency, supporting more consistent decision making.

Overall, I consider the programme is a sound use of public funds that will deliver a significant level of benefits for the public and private sectors and the UK economy, and to conform to the Value for Money Accounting Officer standard.

Feasibility

The programme is assessed as deliverable.  IPT has established structured delivery controls, including a detailed delivery plan which is regularly monitored (with changes managed through formal change control processes), proactive risk management supported by a regularly updated Risk Log and a robust governance structure. The programme is following good practice and adhering to all internal review and approval processes. A project assurance review was completed in July 2022 which examined key programme artifacts and interviewed supplier and senior user representatives and concluded that delivery confidence is Amber, meaning that although there are issues that require management attention, successful delivery to the current plan is feasible.

The major risks to a successful delivery of IPT are the amount of change within immigration policy (for example on Ukraine and Afghanistan) and the need for this to be delivered by various Migration and Borders programmes. This could impact IPT timescales as higher priority work is given preferential access to resources and test platforms. The limited number of test platforms constraints the amount of change IPT can put through at any one time. To try and preserve IPT timescales, the IPT programme has been prioritised against other Migration and Borders programmes.

The underlying quality of the data in CID and Atlas presents a risk to the successful adoption of Atlas, as there may be an unwillingness to trust the validity of the data in the new system. To address this risk a data quality exercise is being undertaken to cleanse the data and put in place more rigorous checking of data entry into Atlas to prevent new errors.

The other major risk to the successful delivery of IPT within the timescales, is the generation of large numbers of Change Requests, which extend the scope of IPT and pushes out the time required to deliver IPT. This is being mitigated by an enhanced change process and by communicating the Continuous Improvement process, that will be in place for the while lifecycle of IPT.

Therefore, considering the above factors and subject to there being a satisfactory resolution to the data validation issues, I consider the programme to be feasible to deliver and to meet Feasibility Accounting Officer standard.

Conclusion

This Accounting Officer Assessment will be published on the government’s website (GOV.UK). Copies will be deposited in the Library of the House of Commons and sent to the Comptroller and Auditor General, and the Treasury Officer of Accounts and the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

As the Accounting Officer for the Home Office, I have considered this assessment of IPT against the four accounting officer standards of regularity, propriety, value for money and feasibility.

I am satisfied the programme:

• relies on clear legal powers
• meets the standards of Managing Public Money and accords with the generally understood principles of public life
• represents good value for money for the Exchequer as a whole
• is feasible to deliver

I am therefore satisfied that the programme is a good use of public resources and meets the overall requirement to deliver an effective immigration service for the UK.

As the Accounting Officer for the Home Office, I considered this assessment of the Immigration Platform Technologies Programme and approved it on 25th August 2022.

I have prepared this summary to set out the key points which informed my decision. This summary will be published on the government’s website (GOV.UK). Copies will be deposited in the Library of the House of Commons and sent to the Comptroller and Auditor General and Treasury Officer of Accounts.

Patricia Hayes CB

Second Permanent Secretary for the Home Office

6 September 2022