Strategic Central & Bureau Platform (SCBP)

Tender description

SCBP provides the core components of the existing IABS (immigration and borders) and IDENT1 (law enforcement) biometric systems after disaggregation of the matcher, gateway and mobile elements. Additional information: The Home Office (Contracting Authority) is the UK's lead Government Department for immigration and borders, passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism and the Police. The Home Office Biometrics Programme (HOB) provides the biometric capability to support UK law enforcement, immigration, border security and UK passport (HMPO) business users. The capability covers the 3 primary biometric modalities of fingerprint, DNA and facial image associated with searches, verification checks and profile storage for our business user.The enrolment, matching, storage and reporting of fingerprints and facial images is provided for the Authority through two legacy systems. The IDENT1 system provides the finger and face capability for UK police forces and law enforcement, with the IABS system delivering the same biometric capability for immigration, the border force and HMPO.The Authority has procured a support contract for significant subsystems within the IDENT1 and IABS systems. These subsystems already exist and have been operational for over 10 years.The existing and implemented subsystems within scope for SCBP shall include but not be limited to:- front end equipment providing users with the ability to capture finger print biometrics, search them against, and add them to the existing data sets for a number of business purposes,- bureaux providing the capabilities for finger print experts to manage the biometric workflows, and intervene when errors need to be corrected,- the Central IDENT1 and IABS subsystems housing the statically defined national collections; and the flexibly defined 'special collections'. These provide the ability for appropriate users to manage records, search collections and be notified of changes,- existing Matchers IDENT1 and IABS Matchers execute biometric searches over the finger and face data sets held for law enforcement, immigration and HMPO purposes. They will be replaced by the Strategic Matcher.For these already built and running subsystems, the SCBP Supplier will provide IT services that include, but not be limited to:- application support and maintenance,- infrastructure support services, including working with the existing data centre provisioning and network supply,- security support services,- ITIL Service Management as part of the wider ecosystem,- development, testing and deployment of continuous improvement and enhancements. This will be commissioned in support of the known pipeline of work.There are also Transformation requirements which may be taken up during the term of the contract:- data centre consolidation. Relocation away from the existing four IDENT1 and IABS Production Data Centres into two Crown Hosting data centres and / or migration of both IDENT1 and IABS applications into the public Cloud,- transformation of the highly distributed physical deployment architecture for Bureaux to a centralised and virtualised solution,- alignment and integration of the Service and Security Management Tooling in line with established strategies.Contract award date was 01/10/2019 with an initial term of 72 months, expiring 31/09/2025. However, this contract can be extended for two periods of up to two (2) years each.