from the start-a-comms-business-and-print-your-own-money dept.
And not even a tentative date for a system go-live either:
By the end of this month, the UK Home Office will have spent just under £2 billion ($2.4 billion) on a new critical communications network for the country's police, fire and ambulance services – with nothing to show for it, according to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO).
Even worse, the multi-year project has fallen further behind schedule and the Home Office cannot say when the replacement system will be operational, according to the spending watchdog.
The Emergency Services Network (ESN) program first kicked off in 2015 – the idea being that it would fully replace the existing near-indestructible Airwave units and system, which uses the Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) network; would "cost less"; and would provide users with access to modern mobile data. ESN was supposed to move critical emergency services off of the tried and tested TETRA (which, among other things, you can access ubiquitously across the London Underground) and onto LTE radio comms – with some obvious modifications and associated features like the push-to-talk ESN Direct.
[...] The UK's Competition and Markets Authority started a probe into the matter in 2021, with the PAC already noting in 2019 that Motorola's involvement in both the new and old contract had led "to perverse incentives" and put "the department in a weak negotiating position." Motorola has denied conflict of interest and said last year that "Airwave, over its life, is a much better deal for the UK taxpayer than the Home Office originally agreed."
[...] In January, eight years after the first proposals for a new system to replace the outdated Airwave platform were unveiled, the Home Office and Motorola Solutions agreed to end their work on the ESN contract in December 2023.
The Home Office, meanwhile, does not currently know when ESN will be ready or how much it will ultimately cost.
[...] The Home Office, meanwhile, maintains that "much" of ESN's "core" has been built, telling The Register: "The Emergency Services Network will provide first responders with better technology and faster access to life-saving data in emergency situations, helping to keep the public safe.
"While much of the core network has already been built, we are committed to addressing the delays and working closely with our partners to provide better value for money for the taxpayer, following Motorola's decision to leave the programme."
It added: "We thank the National Audit Office for their report and are now working at pace to implement all their recommendations."
[...] British taxpayers who are having a good day and want it ruined can download the report here.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @07:46AM (1 child)
What is this "Home Office" of which you speak? This is a local blog, for local Soylentils, there is no place for you here! Oh, this is another British thing? Sorry for my misunderstanding, I thought we were still doing Canadian.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @10:49AM
It literally says "the UK Home Office" in the first sentence.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:13AM (3 children)
Another example in a much too long list of examples of the Sunk Cost fallacy [wikipedia.org].
The Register has had many articles covering this [theregister.com], and as ever, it's always worth reading the comments; many made by experienced cynics in the IT field.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:18AM (2 children)
But is it really the sunk cost fallacy at work here?
https://despair.com/products/consulting [despair.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @03:26PM (1 child)
> there's good money to be made in being buddies with the PM and his buddies from Eton
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2023, @02:00AM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday March 16 2023, @10:10AM (1 child)
So many problems with projects like this - and absolutely typical of government projects. From what I've read:
- A typical "big bang" technical project, where nothing works until everything works.
- A direct conflict of interest, since Motorola earns lots of money (more than $3 billion) keeping the old system alive during these delays
- A lack of any sort of meaningful penalty clause in the contracts for the new system. Why not keep the gravy train running?
If I were a UK politician, I would have a hard look for revolving doors. Either the contracting officials on the government side were incompetent, or they now have very lucrative positions at Motorola...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16 2023, @03:39PM
I hadn't thought about how that factors into keeping the gravy train rolling. But it's a classic trick for keeping the money flowing. Years from now when the project is foundering, they just need to spend less money than a fresh start would cost to get to a working state. Honest.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @10:42AM
Take s a look at the California high-speed rail project if you want to see world-class incompetence and corruption.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday March 16 2023, @01:24PM (2 children)
I suspect this line is the fake news part of the manufactured outrage.
Furthermore I would bet this story was funded, directly or indirectly, by a competitor who didn't get the contract.
My experience as a scanner user on the other side of the planet for decades is these new system roll outs are all the same post 1990 or so. "We'd like to implement our own cell phone network with similar or better service than commercial provides at great expense, and similar or better technologies than cell phones provide, but we're only willing to pay about, or less, than single channel NBFM repeaters from 1970 and certainly not willing to pay what a cell phone network would charge." Followed by fake surprise at the cost overruns. Because small scale on your own is always more expensive than being a customer of large scale.
There's always some empire building going on, trying to being the entire infrastructure inhouse because that means management promotions. I'm surprised they're not demanding their own parallel and separate electrical generation plants and separate dedicated water/sewer infra.
Ironically the only service they "need" to provide is distributed announcing and paging which works fine over analog FM from the 70s. It's "nice" to have mobile data and that makes things cheaper/faster but its not worth it to bring an entire cell phone network including mobile data in-house.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:15PM
Welcome to conflicts of interest 101. You won't get allies of the contractor or associated bureacrats to criticize this.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:37PM
So if you thing "with nothing to show for it" is fake news, what is it you believe they actually have to show for it? What functionality of the system is up and running?Or is there some limited region where it is working?