Credit: eGuide Travel/CC BY 2.0

The Home Office has signed a £4m deal with outsourcer Capgemini to support the conclusion of the rollout of a major new digital service to manage border crossings.

Once it has been fully deployed, the Border Crossing service will be used by 7,000 Border Force to manage arrivals into the UK at 56 locations around the country. A report published by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in the spring found that only 300 users were up and running, with seven in eight locations not yet using the system at all.

Having begun the rollout of the service in December 2020, the current deadline for concluding the delivery of the Digital Services at the Border programme – of which the Border Crossing tool is the centrepiece – is March 2022.

Capgemini has been brought in to serve as a “partner to assist in the final stages of [delivering] Border Crossing”. 

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The consultancy company will be asked to deliver “a full stack team to provide agile cloud design/development, deployment and automated test implementation” services.

The contract with the Hoe Office will come into effect on Friday 1 October and last for one year. 

Efforts to digitise the UK border have been ongoing since 2003, according to the PAC report, and hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on various programmes that have been remodelled, scaled back, or reset. 

DSAB was launched in 2014 and was originally scheduled to conclude in 2019 and the three-year delay has seen expected costs increase by £173m to a total of £372m.

Over the past 15 months, contracts worth a cumulative total of more than £35m have been awarded to various digital and technology suppliers, government procurement data indicates.

Capgemini was awarded a two-year deal worth £4.9m and commencing on 30 June 2020. The engagement covered the Home Office’s need for a “technical delivery partner for ongoing development capabilities, working across the present and future projects of the DSAB programme”.