The Home Office has quietly published a Find-a-Tender notice—dated 1 August 2026—seeking suppliers for software development, support and implementation services worth up to £200 million over five years. The contract will underpin the next stage of the Future Borders and Immigration System (FBIS), including maintenance of the ETA platform and data sharing with carriers. Industry insiders say the tender indicates that the department intends to keep core systems in-house rather than outsourcing to a single prime contractor, a model that drew criticism during the failed e-Borders programme a decade ago. Bidders must demonstrate experience of “24/7 mission-critical environments” and compliance with the government’s cloud-first policy, suggesting a continued shift away from legacy datacentres toward AWS and Azure. For airlines and relocation managers the timing is significant: the current ETA pilot covers just 15 nationalities, but HC 259 confirms universal rollout by October 2026. Robust support contracts are therefore essential to avoid holiday-season outages. The specification emphasises rapid incident response and includes financial penalties if system downtime exceeds 0.1 % per quarter. Tech consultancies have four weeks to submit expressions of interest, with short-listing expected in September and contract award by January 2027. A transitional services agreement will allow incumbents to hand over without interrupting live ETA transactions. Global companies that submit bulk API-based ETA applications for crew and project staff should monitor the procurement for clues on forthcoming service-level improvements—particularly round-trip confirmation times, which currently average nine minutes during peak hours.
Source: Find-a-Tender Service
