Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

The UK's long-running asylum IT overhaul may finally have put the 25-year-old Case Information Database (CID) out to pasture, but Parliament says that officials are still relying on spreadsheets and disconnected systems to keep track of asylum cases. A new report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) found asylum data remains scattered across multiple systems, making it difficult for officials to track cases, spot emerging backlogs, or understand where pressure is building across the wider system. As of December last year, the Home Office was still heavily dependent on CID, a decommissioned platform dating back to the turn of the century, while attempting to move asylum operations onto Atlas. The PAC's findings suggest the migration has not solved a more familiar government IT problem: getting different systems to share information. The committee said that there is still "no single, reliable view of cases across the asylum system." While the Home Office told MPs it has now fully moved to Atlas for asylum case management, officials noted that the transition has been complex, involving legacy data migration, functional improvements, and staff training. MPs also heard that some Home Office staff continue to maintain their own spreadsheets alongside official systems. The committee warned this can leave multiple versions of the same information in circulation and contribute to ongoing data quality problems. One of the bigger gaps sits between the Home Office and HM Courts & Tribunals Service. The two are working to link their case management systems, but MPs said current data-sharing arrangements still make it impossible to follow an individual case through the entire asylum process. The report also echoes earlier National Audit Office findings that a reliable single record for each asylum seeker is still unavailable. Information on issues such as repeat appeals and absconders remains incomplete, inconsistent, or unavailable, while MPs said officials struggled to provide some key figures with confidence. The committee concluded that departments still lack the integrated data needed to understand how people move through the asylum system or whether attempts to fix one bottleneck are simply creating another elsewhere. What's more, without reliable data, MPs said that they cannot properly assess whether the asylum system is improving or whether taxpayers are getting value for money. Departments still lack integrated, system-wide data and agreed performance measures needed to manage the asylum system effectively," the PAC report states. Until these gaps are addressed, senior leaders cannot fully understand where pressures are building or assess whether interventions are working as intended, and Parliament cannot obtain robust assurance on progress or value for money." The old database may be on the way out, but MPs are not convinced the underlying data problems went with it. (R)