5 years ago... Delays hit £70m Siemens immigration database

15.07.98 Siemens Business Services (SBS) admitted today for the first time that its £70m Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme to supply an immigration caseworking database to the Home Office is running at least six months late.

An SBS spokeswoman said: "There have been some delays in the piloting and testing of the system and, unfortunately, we can't actually say at this point when it is going to be delivered."

The Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) entered into the PFI scheme in March 1996. SBS was commissioned to redesign national immigration processes around a single IT system which it will then lease back to the IND in keeping with the PFI model. The project details included the start-up date of October 98.

A Home Office spokesman said he was told the system will be up and running by April 1999 but said he is still waiting for this to be confirmed by SBS.

15.07.03 Delays like this one were all too common in the late 1990s. SBS was far from the only company on a steep learning curve and almost every government department was found wanting with major IT projects not going to plan.

Two years later the National Audit Office called the project "too ambitious" and came up with a series of seven pointers for the future. Slowly public projects are getting better but the level of poor planning and general misjudgement is still at times shocking.