Police chiefs and emergency services workers may be following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a sense of déjà vu. Battlefield commanders in Ukraine are using antique radio kit to communicate. 

This is because Russia’s whizzy new encrypted Era communications system either hasn’t been deployed, or doesn’t work yet – experts can’t agree – so Russians have been buying local SIM cards or using ancient analogue radios to talk to each other. 

We shouldn’t scoff, for like the Russian army, Britain’s emergency services are reliant on ancient technology thanks to terrible leadership. Our blue light front liners are still using a network called Airwave, based on old technology that’s being phased out world wide.

Airwave should have been switched off three years ago, but it’s going to run for at least another four, because like Russia’s Era, the replacement isn’t ready. 

For each year that passes, the monopoly private operator of Airwave can continue to stiff the taxpayer. Sources familiar with the contracts reckon that this operator “earned out” in 2012, yet in 2020 it pocketed a further £432m, according to national auditors.

So what happened? Looking at the history of communications in our policing and emergency services in the UK over a few decades, it’s remarkable to see just how shabbily the state treats these critical services. 

For example, as New Labour and its showbiz friends were ushering in the new century under the Millennium Dome, police were still using UHF radios that had changed very little since the Second World War. Not only could one police force not talk to a neighbouring force, the fire, ambulance and police services couldn’t talk to each other.

Airwave replaced this in 2000. A kind of mutant 2G network, it was a vast improvement over UHF, and had other merits too. The tough and durable handsets have dedicated buttons for the vital walkie talkie feature called “push to talk”. 

The coverage is wider than 4G networks today, covering remote rural locations better. However, Airwave’s replacement, the Emergency Services Network (ESN) project announced in the 2015 spending review by George Osborne, was supposed to be all this and more, too: capable of handling fast data.

“This critical national infrastructure will free up officers’ time, save the taxpayer around £1 million a day when fully operational and connect all emergency services on the same broadband network for the first time,” said Osborne. The transition would begin in 2017 and be complete two years later.

The spanky new ESN would run on EE’s network. But while other countries have migrated their emergency services to 4G, they reserved a portion of their radio spectrum for exclusive use by the emergency services. The UK didn’t, so the police, fire and ambulances will contend with teenagers watching YouTube, or someone trying to make a 999 call. 

Our public networks quickly become saturated in a public emergency, and barely work at large events anyway.

Then the fun really started. Theresa May’s Home Office had already dismantled the police-led agency designing an Airwave replacement, in its “bonfire of the quangos” – leaving technically inept bluffers and duffers in SW1 to be given the runaround by technology suppliers. 

For example, ESN’s designers initially opted for a version of 4G, now long superseded, that didn’t support push to talk. “All the technical experts had something to gain from it,” one source tells me. “Their ‘experts’ were the people selling them stuff.”

Six months after Osborne’s announcement, the American company Motorola, which was already working on ESN, snaffled up Airwave, and its lucrative UK contracts. And a year later, it also acquired a key technology supplier called Kodiak, that enabled 4G networks to perform push to talk. 

Motorola thus found itself being the monopoly owner of the existing UK emergency services network, earning hundreds of millions of pounds a year from it, and also designing its successor. Have a guess what happened next. The answer is: not very much.

By 2017, police still hadn’t been asked what they needed from ESN, and so Whitehall ordered a ”reset”, which was led by a civil servant, Joanna Davison. But as the National Audit Office reported two years later, this left things largely as they were.  The NAO even warned of a “a risk that poor decisions will be made and further ‘resets’ will be needed in future”.

The Competition and Markets Authority, having nodded through Motorola’s Airwave acquisition in 2016, finally intervened last October. It cited a massive potential conflict of interest and noted the inability of the Home Office to revise the gravy-laden Airwave contract significantly, despite several attempts. (Motorola says it is working with the CMA to demonstrate that it provides “exceptional value for the UK emergency services”.)

2024 is now the earliest date we can expect to see ESN go live, although those who know the project best continue to have doubts.

Two additional details give this the traditional British flavour that every Government IT fiasco requires. In 2017, a Chinese company, Hytera, acquired Sepura, which makes the Airwave handsets, and are developing ESN too. This seems astonishing given the Government’s subsequent decision to remove “high risk vendors”, like Huawei, from our networks.

And you can guess what happened to the civil servant responsible for the failed ESN “reset”. In any other sector, Joanna Davinson would have been bundled off the premises after a very low key farewell drinks. She now finds herself executive director at the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), or the Cabinet Office’s technology supremo. But then failing upwards is how gravity flows in our civil service.

Andrew Orlowski tweets at @andreworlowski