Complaints against officers

[Fedster + 1,307]

Rugged 999 smartphone handsets need more hardware so they can be tested properly on delayed Airwave replacement.

Date - 21st January 2020
By - Gary Mason

The Home Office has issued a £40 million tender this month for new hardware devices to be tested on the late and over-budget replacement to the Airwave system.

In 2017 the Home Office awarded a £221m contract to Samsung to develop ruggedised handsets for police, fire and ambulance to use on the new network which is now due to go live in 2022 when the Airwave system is switched off.

The new handsets contain Sim cards that will give police officers and other 999 workers priority over commercial users on a dedicated 4G EE network.

But those handsets cannot currently be tested properly due to “the immaturity of the standards and the lack of support in current devices and networks,” according to the tender notice.

Therefore an interim solution is required in the form of a Tetra based device to device remote speaker microphone (RSM) for use with handheld mobile devices on the ESN.

This basically means that because of the long delay in getting the network up and running on schedule the devices that have already been procured cannot be tested properly and other hardware needs to be procured to get over that problem.

The ESN was always going to be a gamble for such a huge and expensive government technology project because it was going to be built on LTE (Long Term Evolution) communications technology that was, at the time of the procurement, untested and emerging in the public safety market both in the UK and US.

The Home Office decided the gamble was worth taking based on the potential benefits and cost savings that could be delivered by a replacement 4G network for the Blue Light services.

The ESN was originally scheduled to go live by the end of 2019 and according to the National Audit Office, it is 50 per cent over budget at £9.3 billion.

The shutdown date for Airwave has now been set as 2022 and part of the budget overspend is the £1.4 billion cost on extending its use until then.

The project has been ranked by a think tank as the second-highest overspent procurement exercise in the UK behind the Crossrail transport project.  

Meanwhile police forces are having to plug the gap on the Airwave system by buying replacement handsets as the old radios, many of which were procured 15 years ago, start of fail.

This week, Durham’s Police Crime and Victims’ Commissioner Steve White, complained that he was having to use £700,000 of the force’s overstretched budget to buy replacement Airwave handsets.

Last year, London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing Sophie Linden approved £24.3 million in funding to replace Met Police radios which were out of warranty and too expensive to fix.

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[BlueBob + 691]

The idea that only Crossrail has had a higher overspend.  Clearly the report authors have not yet heard about HS2!

[Beaker 817]

49 minutes ago, BlueBob said:

The idea that only Crossrail has had a higher overspend.  Clearly the report authors have not yet heard about HS2!

Percentage-wise it is on track to beat crossrail.  ESN is a Good Idea plagued by poor strategic planning and execution.  I read somewhere that Motorola had a handset ready to go, but they're not allowed to go to a single supplier for all the infrastructure.  I should hopefully be working in my force's Airwave department soon provided my medical checks come through, and ESN was something we talked about in the interview.  I've also heard a rumour we're getting of before anyone else so we can test it.  That should be good for the OT at least!

[BlueBob + 691]

13 hours ago, Beaker said:

Percentage-wise it is on track to beat crossrail.

Firstly hope new job comes up and you get to enjoy the new adventure.

bit concerned that you may have too far an advanced maths ability and over qualified for the role if you can do percentages already.  Just seen a quote that the original was £16 bn and likely to Bt £106bn..... “ the cost has more than doubled”.   
 

[Beaker 817]

38 minutes ago, BlueBob said:

Firstly hope new job comes up and you get to enjoy the new adventure.

bit concerned that you may have too far an advanced maths ability and over qualified for the role if you can do percentages already.  Just seen a quote that the original was £16 bn and likely to Bt £106bn..... “ the cost has more than doubled”.   
 

Crossrail is at about 6 times over budget on projection, ESN has no projections in place and we're 3.1Bn over budget already before anything has been delivered. They've not delivered the handsets yet, and they've not been purchased by the individual forces.  As far as I'm aware from my following of this they've still no working vehicle or aircraft sets.  These need designing and testing.  Then you're also needing the new comms rigs, training of PCROs and rolling out training to coppers as well along with user acceptance testing etc etc.  

In 2017 they were estimating the cost to come in at £9.3bn, and since then we've had even more slippages on the projects.  If it comes in at under 25Bn from the original 5.5bn I'll be massivelty surprised ( I'd not even be slightly surprised if it came in significantly over that of they have to pause it again)and that's without factoring in Airwave extension which from what I've read is likely to be up to about 2027.  That's about 650m a year on it's own.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Beaker