As top officials admit uncertainty over case details and an inability for data to pass between different bits of government, government leaders reassure MPs that integration work is near completion
The Home Office and the justice system hope to complete “complex” work to connect siloed data systems in the coming weeks.
In a recent evidence session of the Public Accounts Committee, MPs confronted senior officials with some robust questions concerning how data is processed and shared across the various stakeholders in the UK’s asylum system.
In answer to one such enquiry, Emma Churchill, a director general at the Ministry of Justice, said that “in the current system, we do not know whether someone has appealed” an asylum decision.
“That is part of the problem with our systems not integrating properly with the Home Office’s systems,” she added.
The importance of better integration has been amplified by a recently announced government mandate to require the asylum system’s first-tier tribunal to rule within 24 weeks on all appeals made by foreign national criminal offenders not currently incarcerated, as well as claimants living in supported accommodation.
“Work is going on to better link up the systems digitally,” Churchill told MPs. “I am afraid that I do not know whether that will help us on the question of repeated appeals within the current first-tier tribunal, but the systems that the Home Office will need to establish for the new independent appeals body will be separate systems. Again, we will have to make sure that the interoperability is there.”
The Home Office’s director for asylim, Rannia Leontaridi, told the committee that, after numerous delays, all data and operations have been fully switch over to Atlas: the UK’s new national immigration caseworking system, which replaces the former Case Information Database.
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“Everything has migrated to Atlas—it is operating, and right now it is the only operational system in decision-making,” she said. “We are working to improve some of the join-up with some of the operations, so that it is end to end, in terms of both who enters the asylum system and how they exit. We are also making great strides in developing future linkages on the system with local authorities and police. It is not perfect in the things it can do, but it is a system orchestrator that gives a pen picture of the individual.”
Despite such progress, MPs continued to express confoundment at the lack of joining up between information systems – pointing, in particular, that a single caseworking ID number cannot currently be used across central and local government, and the criminal justice system.
MoJ permanent secretary Jo Farrar claimed that a current programme of work to integrate systems across her department and the Home Office is due to wrap up by spring.
“It has been quite complex to integrate the two systems,” she said. “It is not entirely simple because we were operating different systems, so you have to help those systems to talk to each other and share data to be able to use one identifier across the systems. You say it is not that difficult; it is actually quite difficult—it needs money and a focused effort. We are confident that we will get there by spring. It is not an overnight fix. I am sure that the Home Office is working with other partners.”
The second permanent secretary at the Home Office, Simon Ridley, added: “As we have said a number of times, we have a lot of data on individuals. The challenge is joining that data up between different systems and managing it through time, because people move between different bits of our system and other systems, and they move in and out of contact. We absolutely agree that there is a lot to do to continue improving the strength of the data we have. We have built a single system to enable us to start doing that, and there is a lot more work to do.”
