Written evidence from the Home Office
I undertook to provide further information on two of the Committee’s questions about the Emergency Services Network: the timing of Motorola’s notification to us and the time dedicated for testing.
Following the hearing, Mr Webb has spoken again to Motorola and the ESMCP programme team to establish further details about the period before Motorola's 16 January email to the Department and their 24 January email to the Committee (to which we were not privy).
As Mr Webb and I explained, we were first notified of Vodafone's intention to cease support for the old infrastructure in March 2020 when the Department received the 16 January email from Motorola. We have now clarified that Vodafone raised this issue with Motorola on 6 December, who emailed the ESMCP programme team on 12 December to explain that they would work with Vodafone on the options for maintaining support for Airwave beyond March 2020.
Having explored a range of options with Vodafone, Motorola emailed the Department on 16 January to inform us that the new technology Vodafone planned to introduce might not work for Airwave (see my letter to the Committee of 27 January). We then initiated the structured mitigation process Mr Webb described to the Committee, the next milestone in which is the meeting on 20 February at which Motorola and Vodafone will present options to maintain support for Airwave beyond March 2020. I will update the Committee thereafter.
The Committee also requested some further information about the testing schedule. I can confirm that the total in the revised programme plan for testing is 70 weeks and have attached the timeline, which runs from February 2017 until June 2018. You will see from the chart that testing is being conducted in multiple areas in parallel, and will be a continuous process as the solution is designed, developed and deployed.
Failover testing - the testing of the architecture and resilience of the solution - began this month and is scheduled to conclude mid-April. Integration and performance testing between Motorola and EE is scheduled to begin in May and will conclude in late November. This overlaps with a period when Motorola and EE will begin testing in the Live ESN environment, in which they will carry out further rounds of integration and performance testing. This process will begin in November and conclude in January 2018. Nominated pilot testing, likely to be in a police force within the North West transition region, will start in April 2018 and conclude by early June 2018. Each transition region will then have a period to carry out their own pilot testing of the ESN during their transition phase. We will include an update on this in the regular reports we will provide to the Committee, which will also cover progress with TfL, whom I met yesterday.
I hope this information is useful to the Committee. We will of course respond formally in due course to your report and helpful recommendations via Treasury Minute.
Mark Sedwill, Permanent Secretary