Home Office seeks Brexit IT “magician”
With Brexit rapidly approaching, the successful candidate could face a gargantuan organisational task
With Brexit approaching, the successful candidate could face a gargantuan organisational task.
experts have reacted with astonishment to the last-minute job advertisement seeking someone to head up the Home Office’s Brexit IT implementation.
With seven months until the UK could bow out of Europe, the Home Office has advertised for a EU Exit Technology Delivery Lead to work across multiple projects – primarily focused on border control, immigration and biometric projects.
According to the Home Office, the successful candidate would be responsible for the EU exit strategy, which sits “atop and across its existing change portfolios”.
“As UK prepares to leave the EU the demand is likely to leverage new capabilities already planned for delivery, but it could also require significant changes to existing plans, and the standing up of entirely new projects,” the job advert continues. “The activities will reach across structural boundaries.”
According to experts, such a role would ideally have been filled as soon after the EU referendum as possible – not left for two years, leaving the successful candidate with a massive task and uncertain deadlines. “It does seem very late, considering what the remit of the job is,” said Dr Pasi Ahonen, a lecturer in organisational management and human resources at the University of Essex.
“Someone is supposed to come in, into a completely new role that rests ‘on top’ of the existing organisation, combine various elements of it for a particular purpose (EU exit) and make a success of it.”
Ahonen pointed the finger at former Brexit secretary David Davis for delays that make the job an impossible task in the time frame. “This job should have been created immediately when the Brexit department was created,” he explained. “It is just that the remit and delivery demands are almost immediate, which is just simply not going to happen.”
Although the role appears to form part of a change in the way the government plans to approach IT projects – with a move towards more in-house management – there are concerns that the new recruit could inherit an unworkable plan. “There seems to be a very clear sense of the strategic direction and not very much idea in-house on how to implement the strategy,” said Ahonen. “Whoever takes on the job will have to be a bit of a magician.”
The salary of around £100,000 also drew criticism on social media, with cynics saying it was too low for such a Herculean task. To highlight the scale of the role, the Home Office said annually its systems support over 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, 5 million passport applications and 140 million police checks on people and property.