Home Office hands £28M to immigration IT incumbents after procurement challenge

PUBLIC SECTOR

Continuity support required after £336 million replacement deal delayed by more than a year

The UK Home Office has awarded contract extensions worth £28 million to two incumbent tech suppliers of the much-delayed Atlas immigration and asylum system after a legal challenge derailed an earlier procurement process.

The Whitehall department in charge of policing, borders, and immigration awarded PA Consulting a five-month contract extension worth £13.5 million and Mastek a four-month extension worth £15 million. Both contracts were awarded without competition.

The Register understands the Home Office began an open procurement for new contracts in the summer of 2025. However, Mastek launched a legal challenge in October after it was eliminated following the second stage of bidding for a £138 million Atlas contract.

Mastek alleged there had been "manifest errors" in the scoring and that competing bidders had access to information that had not been made available to it. It sought about £47 million in lost profits and approximately £158,000 in wasted bid costs. The case was settled in May 2026 and the procurement was withdrawn.

A Home Office spokesperson told The Register: "These allegations, including that the Home Office acted in breach of the Public Contracts Regulations, have never been proven or accepted, and there has been no admission of liability."

The Register understands the Home Office extended its existing tech supplier contracts to ensure service continuity.

In June 2026, the department published an early market engagement exercise – which does not mark the start of a competition – concerning the provision of services, support, and development to the case management software that supports the asylum system, a politically contentious issue in the UK.

"The system has a requirement to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week availability, with updates and enhancements continually delivered to enhance functionality and capabilities. It underpins a range of critical national priorities and a significant amount of continuous improvement work driving strategic outcome delivery," the notice says.

The procurement is expected to be split into asylum and non-asylum immigration systems. The notice says Atlas is "a containerized open source Java microservice application deployed into AWS, which orchestrates workflow following business process management processes, triggered by events, using agile release trains which group microservices for release."

The plan is also "to evolve and enhance the overall immigration caseworking operating model, with a greater emphasis on supplier accountability, collaboration, and strategic partnership," the notice says.

It places a value of £336 million (including tax) on the deal, which is set to last from June 2027 to May 2031, with the option to extend until May 2033.

In 2025, the Home Office blogged that Atlas was ready to replace CID, the legacy system that began development in 2000. Atlas was built by Accenture, Mastek, and PA Consulting, and was projected to be fully implemented in 2021. However, the Home Office missed that deadline.

In 2023, The Register revealed the Home Office had missed a second deadline for the full handover and decommissioning of CID.

As of December 2025, Home Office staff still appeared to be using the legacy system for some information. As of June 2026, a report from the Public Accounts Committee confirmed the department no longer used the legacy system, although it found staff still needed to maintain their own spreadsheets in parallel to the case management system.

Also in June, a report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration slammed Atlas for failing to help case workers learn from the outcome of legal appeals. ®