Home Office Biometric Strategic Central Bureau Platform Preliminary Market Engagement Event

Market Engagement: Strategic Central and Bureau Platform (SCBP) procurement The Home Office is seeking to engage with potential suppliers ahead of two potential future procurements covering the support, development, transition and ongoing modernisation of the Strategic Central and Bureau Platform and associated services. SCBP is a critical Home Office digital capability that underpins a range of biometric, identity, and law enforcement systems, supporting operational decision making across immigration, borders, policing and wider law enforcement activity.

SCBP plays a key role in enabling the Home Office and its partners to protect the public, prevent and detect criminality, and safeguard vulnerable individuals, while ensuring appropriate controls over data privacy, security and access. SCBP is a key component of the Home Office Biometrics landscape which provides a shared, resilient capability to host and support multiple biometric and identity related services, enabling the secure processing, storage and exchange of sensitive data.

It supports both live operational services and analytical capabilities, operating at national scale and across multiple delivery partners, technologies and hosting arrangements. The Home Office has recently transitioned much of the technology onto more modern and widely adopted technology stacks, potentially opening up more of the required support and development functions to suppliers with broader expertise and presenting greater opportunities for a wider range of suppliers to participate.

As a result the Home Office is currently considering its future commercial and delivery approach for SCBP including potential disaggregation and is keen to engage early with the market to test assumptions, gather supplier insight, and inform the development of its procurement strategy, scope and delivery model. Indicative Scope The potential supplier(s) may be required to provide elements relating to the SCBP platform and associated services, which may include (but are not limited to): • Biometric experience • Platform hosting and infrastructure services • Application and platform engineering and support services • Security, resilience and availability services • Integration with dependent Home Office and third party systems • Data management, environment management and tooling • Transition, onboarding and knowledge transfer services • Support for live service operations and continuous improvement • Transformation services The precise scope, delivery model and commercial structure are subject to further development and will be informed by this and subsequent market engagement activity.

All dates and values described within this notice refer to the entirety of scope, which may potentially result in more than one procurement and potential contracts. Note given the potential disaggregation approach, interested suppliers may not be required to provide all of the scope described above.

The estimated value included in this notice is based on current annual charges and represents an indicative upper bound only. A significant proportion of the cost relates to services that are currently under consideration for alternative delivery models, including potential insourcing or partial insourcing.

As a result, the Authority has material uncertainty over the final scope, structure and cost of any future procurement(s). This market engagement may result in one or more procurements and, if taken forward, may lead to contracts with differing lengths and values materially lower than or otherwise different from the indicative figure stated. Final scope, structure and value will be determined following further analysis and engagement and will be confirmed through any future procurement notice(s).