Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

Public sector

Years into a major IT overhaul, MPs say the department still lacks reliable view of what is happening across the asylum system

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...

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