Background What David Neal reported

David Neal, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, gave the Home Office a series of warnings about Atlas:

The IT system did not allow caseworkers to record the rationale behind their actions when ruling on family visas, a 2021 report found. This created difficulties when appeals and legal challenges arose.

The issue had to be “raised with the developers of Atlas”, and civil servants described the system as a “minimum viable product” at the time of the inspection.

Atlas contained inaccurate data on asylum seekers, and failed to record people receiving Home Office support when they were living in government hotels.

Officials had to “duplicate information across multiple systems” because Atlas and other software were developed independently, without linking up effectively. Mr Neal highlighted a warning that: “significant manual inputting of information creates opportunities for human error.”

Home Office staff assessing visas for people from Hong Kong complained of “technical glitches and ‘system errors’ with Atlas that had led to applications becoming stuck in the system”. It resulted in children being accidentally left without visas.

Civil servants told the watchdog that errors led to some applications “falling into a black hole”, meaning they could not be processed, Those affected were told only that delays were caused by “technical issues”. “Caseworkers were frustrated by these issues and the slow response by the Home Office-wide IT support team,” the 2021 report said.

When the team running Atlas updated the system, it automatically sent out a batch of letters “which contained symbols and nonsensical, misspelt words”.

Work to deport foreign offenders was held up because “data is not accurate”, making everyday tasks take “several times longer to complete”.