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EE was first awarded the contract to deliver ESN mobile services back in 2015. An updated agreement with government covers connections to commercial 5G services and ‘more granular regional KPIs’.

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The Home Office has signed BT and its subsidiary EE to a new £2bn-plus deal to provide the connectivity that underpins the UK’s incoming Emergency Services Network – which will also now benefit from 5G connections.

Mobile network operator EE was first awarded a £650m-plus deal to provide ESN’s “mobile services” back in December 2015 – just a few weeks before the completion of the company’s acquisition by BT. The contract has since been extended to an end date of 31 December, with the value of the engagement rising to £826.75m.

Newly published commercial documents reveal that this agreement has now been terminated and replaced with a new deal that came into effect this week and runs for an term of seven years and three months, plus a potential extension of one further year. The contract is valued at £1.85bn plus VAT, equating to an overall worth of £2.22bn.

The new agreement covers the provision of all the services covered in the initial 2015 deal, as well as “certain modifications which are designed to optimise the delivery and performance of the ESN, [and are] based on experience gained during the original… agreement”, according to the contract award notice.

Chief among these updates appears to be a commitment that emergency services users can “utilise the mobile services suppliers’ commercial radio-access network [of] 4G with an evolution path to 5G stand-alone” connectivity.

When the two parties first signed a contract, the country’s first 5G services were still years away from launching but, having been introduced in 2019, about 90% of the UK’s buildings can now connect to 5G.

The ability to connect to these commercial services will supplement  BT and EE’s provision of the “dedicated core network for ESN”, the award notice said.

“The mobile services [contract] also include services to support the provision of… air-to-ground coverage… to ten thousand feet, marine coverage to twelve nautical miles offshore, the London Underground and other specific locations including specified road and rail tunnels and rail stations, and the provision of mobile network coverage capable of supporting the critical PSCS (public safety communications solution) services required by the three emergency services,” the commercial document added.

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As well as these core telecoms services, BT and EE will also provide the Home Office with “the management of availability and capacity across the ESN network [and] the provision of support services as required to optimise the network for PSCS usage”.

The suppliers will also be expected to support “the ongoing protection of coverage scope and the provision of in-fill coverage at key critical operational locations such as high footfall locations – [including] stadia, shopping centres, [and] travel hubs – hospitals, police stations, fire stations and critical national infrastructure locations, where appropriate, using infrastructure that is or can be shared by other mobile network operators, as well as a process for remedying coverage gaps in areas of high risk” for the organisations using ESN.

Also covered by the new contract is the “further deployment of network power resilience to mitigate national and local power outages to ensure that [users] can continue to operate safely and effectively if and when such events occur”, the commercial notice added.

The agreement will also “alter the commercial model [of the previous contract] to better reflect alignment with the services being delivered and the timing of payments”, as well as featuring “more granular regional KPIs to improve the management of the services”.

BT and EE will soon have to work alongside a new provider of voice and video services after the Home Office terminated a major contract with Motorola Solutions in late 2022.

The new mobile services agreement contains “mechanisms to address the introduction” of a replacement voice provider, the identity of which is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, after bidding for a £1bn-plus contract took place last year.

In its new arrangement with BT and EE, the Home Office has also taken steps to “update the requirements in relation to collaboration across suppliers, insurance and liability levels and also settle several outstanding areas of dispute”, according to the notice.

Social value requirements for public sector suppliers have been introduced since the original mobile services deal between the parties was signed, and these will be included in the replacement version.

BT and EE were awarded the new seven-year contract via a closed negotiation with the Home Office, and without any competitive process. This was justified under procurement regulations, the department claims, because “another supplier would not be able to meet the authority’s technical requirements within the required timescales…  [as it] would need to build a dedicated ESN core 4G/5GSA network in [its] datacentres”.

‘Fully transitioned’
The timescales in question look set no more than five years, as the notice says that governments “requires users to be fully transitioned to ESN, including a c. 2-year transition period, by 2029”.
The timescales in question look set no more than five years, as the notice says that governments “requires users to be fully transitioned to ESN, including a c. 2-year transition period, by 2029”.

The Home Office has this year been working on revising the business case for ESN, including providing an updated formal estimate of the programme’s cost and timeline – the most recent version of which promised a completion of delivery by the end of 2026.

Confirmation that 2029 is now the deadline for the switching to ESN means that the project conclude a decade later than the original target of 2019. These delays – and the split from Motorola – have seen projected costs double from £6bn to about £12bn, as per the latest estimate.

In the meantime, emergency services users continue to rely on the Airwave network that has been in use for almost 25 years. The platform is owned by Motorola Solutions which, according to a ruling last year by the Competition and Markets Authority, has benefited from a “virtually unconstrained monopoly position” by charging government “considerably over the odds” for the network’s ongoing provision.

The CMA ordered the tech company to reduce its pricing of its incumbent Airwave deal by more than £1bn.