Recommendation 23

The Department recognised that the split of responsibilities between its ESN suppliers is suboptimal.76 The Independent Assurance Panel told us that the complexity had been increased in 2015, when amended contracts had made the Home Office responsible for systems integration, a task it did not have the skills to do.77 The Department acknowledged that if it looked at ESN through a purely commercial, financial or technical lens, it would not retain its current approach, which it called a ‘recommended’ rather than ‘preferred’ option. It felt that had it been able to start again with a blank sheet of paper it would probably prefer to adopt a prime contractor approach, which would allow it to step back from the systems integration role.78 But it felt constrained by the need to turn off Airwave off as quickly as possible, which meant it could only make ‘tweaks’ to the programme’s commercial structure.79 Running ESN as a live service