The Emergency Services Network – Report Summary

Summary

The Home Office (the Department) is attempting to create the Emergency Services Network (ESN) to provide a new mobile communications service for the emergency services in the UK. ESN will replace the existing Airwave system, which although reliable, is expensive, does not provide modern data services, and will eventually become obsolete. The Department started the programme to deliver ESN in 2015 and expected to turn off Airwave in 2019. Now, in 2023, the Department still does not know when ESN will be ready and has little to show the taxpayer for its efforts, despite having spent some £2 billion. Delays to ESN have meant the emergency services have borne significant costs in running Airwave for longer. They have temporarily disbanded their ESN teams and found their own ways to access mobile data.

As we feared, the Department’s attempt to reset ESN in 2018 did not work and the programme is delayed yet again. The Department now needs to replace Motorola, one of its key suppliers, and plans to extend its contract with EE. Until a new supplier is in place, the Department can make only limited further progress. The Department considers that the technology ESN needs is now readily available in the market, but we are concerned that even after a new supplier is appointed, ESN will still be a high-risk programme with many challenges, including integrating the various parts of ESN together, testing the technology, providing the right level of coverage and resilience, and transitioning all emergency services onto the new service. The Department continues to be optimistic that it can solve these problems, but this optimism is disconnected from the reality that the Department has never been able to produce a realistic plan for delivering ESN and there is not yet evidence that the technology will work as well as Airwave. The Department claims it has learned not to set another arbitrary deadline for turning off Airwave, but we have heard this before. The Department did not give us confidence that it could break the cycle of over-optimism followed by delays.

The only significant progress is that the Department’s new programme leadership team has won back the support of the emergency services. But the Department still needs to prove that it can deliver. Even if the Department gets the programme back on track, it will take at least 10 years before the savings from ESN justify its cost, and the Department has paused its work to decide how ESN will be run as a live service. This means that the long-term risks to value-for-money are still high. There is also a risk that extending the role of EE may replicate some of the issues with Airwave, where a lack of competition meant a monopoly supplier could make excessive profits at the taxpayer’s expense.