Ex chief immigration inspector reveals he repeatedly warned the department about problems with malfunctioning Atlas system
Atlas, meant to ‘automate’ asylum, citizenship and visa applications, has instead been causing serious delays and errors with a series of bizarre glitches, some seen as ‘critical incidents’was alerted to problems with its faulty £71m IT system and the “awful” data it produces years ago and “just accepted” them, according to the UK’s former chief immigration inspector.
The first time he became aware of them was during a 2021 inspection of visas issued to families wanting to settle in the UK. Atlas was then raised as an issue by Home Office staff in multiple reports he produced.The Home Office says Atlas was in its early stages of testing and roll-out in 2021 and that “substantial changes have been made to improve data quality” since then.
*A 2021 ICIBI report on family visas found that while Atlas had helped to speed up decisions, it did not allow caseworkers to record the rationale behind their actions – creating difficulty when appeals and legal challenges arose. The report, from September 2021, added: “Significant manual inputting of information creates opportunities for human error.”
“Caseworkers were frustrated by these issues and the slow response by the Home Office-wide IT support team,” the report said. An accounting assessment in September 2022, which was not made public until January this year, said the programme had cost £406m since 2014 and another £66m was expected to be spent through to completion.
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