£9m cost of eye scanning 'would have been better spent on immigration staff' (Guardian)
The report also criticises the price of the programme: "[IRIS'] sole value appears to have been that it provided data for the e-gates. This money could have been better spent on border staff - at least 60 immigration officers could have been employed with the money spent on IRIS."
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| Image: BBC |
Sixty immigration officers for six years for £9m? That sounds like a pretty good deal. But is it true?
First, the costs: If we take the article at face value, £9m divided by 60 immigration officers since 2006 = £25,000 per officer per year. Is this realistic?
The Home Office isn't currently hiring Immigration Officers but if it was their starting salary details are available at their site: UK Border Agency: Current Vacancies. Since 1 July 2009, new immigration officers earn an annual salary of £21,947 in London and £21,505 nationally.
According to Indicator, a rule of thumb for the true, fully-loaded cost of an employee is at least 150% of their salary, and Indicator seems to be referring to the private sector where wages tend to represent a greater proportion of total compensation than in the public sector. The additional cost comes from pensions, training, employers' NI, medical insurance, etc.
Let's also assume a 2% per year pay increase (not too generous, really, but I do recall seeing that number somewhere). Taking the lower end of the fully-loaded cost estimate and the lower of the two Border Agency salaries for Immigration Officers we get a cost of £203,484.21 for the first six years of an Immigration Officer's career.
Not too bad, so far. Though at £203,484.21 per officer for six years and a budget of £9m, the Guardian's 60 immigration officers have shrunk to 44.23 immigration officers.
Second, The benefits: Or, What do you mean by Immigration Officer?
When someone says 60 Immigration Officers for £9m, it's natural to imagine 60 shiny new immigration stations at Gatwick and Heathrow staffed and ready to go. Is this realistic?
This HomeOffice.gov document describes working hours and benefits. When you add it all up and split the difference on the 5 extra days of seniority-based annual leave, an Immigration Officer can only work 18.5% of the hours in a year (1,618 work hours vs. 8,766 hours in a year). They're only human, of course (and, of course, this is half the point of this post). But from a security and productivity standpoint, the occupied desks are the true unit of work, not the number of souls who earn their living at the Home Office.
With these numbers, staffing one Immigration Officer post, 'round the clock for one year requires 5.41 immigration officers. Staffing that single desk for six years will cost £1,101,908.91. The £9m cost of eye scanning over six years could have been spent on staffing 8.11 immigration officer posts 'round the clock for six years. 60 officers morph into 44 officers staffing 8 desks.
Staffing 8 desks for six years may have been preferable to using the IRIS system for the same amount of time but the information required to make that judgement isn't publicly available. Whatever the case, the choice was never between sixty immigration officers or iris biometrics.
The measure relevant to labor is productivity. The measure relevant to biometric systems is return on investment. Sometimes, especially in organizations such as the Home Office that don't measure success in terms of revenues and profits, the return on investment in biometric systems is revealed in the productivity of the organization's employees.
Given that the airports in question have opted to replace the IRIS system with eGates using facial recognition, it seems at least plausible that the IRIS system proved the worthiness of biometric systems and was simply displaced by a superior technology.
After all, the headline doesn't read: "IRIS System Turned Off, 60 Immigration Officers Hired."
