UK’s LTE-based ESN still getting red marks over delays

A little under two years ago, the UK’s Emergency Services Network (ESN) was already in trouble. Well over budget and late by several years, the project has been overhauled a number of times and those responsible have been admonished on numerous occasions by oversight bodies such as the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the National Audit Office (NAO).

Fast forward to April 2023, and the situation has, remarkably, got even worse. Originally scheduled to go live in 2019, the project has now been delayed to 2026. However, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently suggested that the ESN may not be up and running until 2029. Meg Hillier, chair of PAC, said the program to date has cost around £2 billion (US$2.5 billion).

Originally heralded as a modern-day replacement of the old-style TETRA-based Airwave network provided by Motorola Solutions, and based on an LTE network from BT-owned mobile operator EE, ESN has been an ongoing source of embarrassment for the UK’s Home Office.

Motorola Solutions was also a key contractor for the ESN, and was due to supply its Kodiak solution as the mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) application to enable essential voice communications over the LTE network. However, Motorola Solutions terminated its ESN contract in December 2022 with a 12-month transition period, meaning that the Home Office is now seeking a new PTT supplier. The ESN has effectively been placed on pause.

As conceded during a March 2023 PAC hearing by Sir Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, ESN “is the biggest and hardest of all of the Home Office’s programs, and we have a portfolio that is stuffed full of very difficult programs. This is the reddest of them all.”

During a later PAC hearing in April, Simon Ricketts, a senior technology adviser and chair of the Independent Technical Assurance Panel at the Home Office, offered one explanation for the project’s extreme tardiness: it was ahead of its time.

“The whole issue, which is why [PAC] has been wrestling with it since 2012, I believe, is that it was just premature and not feasible at the time. When it started to become feasible … it coincided with a very difficult 2021 in terms of delivery from Motorola, and then of course their decision to leave the programme. Just as progress was starting to be made, a whole piece of the programme was missing,” Ricketts said.

Finding a workaround

PAC held the two ESN hearings in March and April to gather evidence from the Home Office as well as representatives of the emergency services, including fire and rescue, ambulance services and the police. The hearings provide some interesting insights into why the project continues to drag on, and how the delay is affecting the actual end-users.

As explained by Kier Pritchard, chief constable in charge of ESN at the National Police Chiefs Council, the delay has impacted the capabilities of all three emergency services to plan for the future, and has also severely dented their confidence in the deliverability and future interoperability of ESN.

A big problem is that ESN devices are not yet ready, but the services are worried about investing in “old new” Airwave devices that could quickly become obsolete. Furthermore, there are concerns about the obsolescence of aging Airwave infrastructure.

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