 would cost around £250m a year. That compared to the £450m annual bill for the existing system, Airwave. Maude's projections have proved optimistic, to put it mildly. The bill just keeps getting higher and the completion date pushed out so far that there must be questions about whether it will ever see the light of day at all. The Home Office has spent £2bn on ESN to date, and has conceded that the total cost could end up being as high as £11bn, and as is nearly always the case with such projects there's a reasonable bet it could be greater still. Meanwhile the cost of Airwave is still being counted, too. First envisaged in 2010, work began on the ESN programme in 2015. The upgrade was due to come into force in 2019 but delays resulted in the completion date eventually being pushed out as far as 2026. Yet, eight years after work began – and somewhat incredibly – the PAC says the Government 'does not know when ESN will be ready'. Perhaps bureaucratic records will be broken. Bear in mind that the Anglo-French treaty that gave birth to Concorde was signed in 1962 and she took flight less than seven years later. Most jaw-droppingly, MPs claim that some of the costs of building ESN are being indirectly borne by the emergency services themselves because the delays have forced them to buy additional devices operating on Airwave. So-called 'transitional costs' amount to £9.5m for the ambulance services; £6m for the fire service, plus another £2m on early versions of ESN which now had to be replaced; while police forces estimate that it will have spent an additional £150m on additional devices by 2026. 'Further costs are inevitable', the PAC notes drily.){kind=link}
Home Office’s botched upgrade to emergency services network is a shocking example of incompetence
In last year’s Spring Statement, an up-and-coming young Chancellor by the name of Rishi Sunak had an important message for the country. “During these challenging times, it is vital every single penny of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash is well spent”, he said.
The timing was important. This was a government that had saddled the public purse with a breath-taking pandemic bailout bill, and there was a growing belief that hundreds of billions in Covid stimulus had contributed to the inflationary surge that would make everyone poorer.
Sunak wanted everyone to understand in no uncertain terms that an era of mass borrowing and mass spending was coming to an abrupt end, to be replaced by one in which the Treasury would be miraculously transformed into a model of fiscal restraint.
So it should surprise precisely no one that shocking examples of profligacy and incompetence from a state apparatus that blew billions on unusable PPE are still mounting up.