Motorola is suing the Home Office, alleging underpayment of bills for operating the police radio network since March 2023.
This lawsuit marks the latest episode in a series of disputes over the proprietary Airwave secure communications system and its associated costs, dating back to the project’s inception in 2000.
Court documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph reveal that Motorola accuses the Home Office of failing to settle the full amounts due on invoices. The claims, filed last month, suggest that the Home Office neglected to pay additional costs associated with inflation.
Motorola is seeking £13.5 million, along with interest estimated at around £1 million. In contrast, the Home Office maintains that all invoices concerning charges from 2021 onwards are incorrect.
This legal claim by Motorola is the most recent in a long-standing series of disputes over Airwave, culminating in a complaint to the Competition & Markets Authority in 2021. The authority found that Motorola had exploited its monopoly position to inflate the prices that emergency services were obliged to pay.
Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts that conducted the investigation, stated, “Our investigation showed that Motorola held all the cards when it came to pricing. With no other providers in the market, our fire, police, and ambulance services had no choice but to pay the rates set by Motorola – meaning they paid almost £200 million a year more than they would have if the market were working well.”
As a result, the CMA imposed a cap on the amount that Motorola can charge for the use of the Airwave network.
The Airwave service was scheduled to be fully replaced five years ago with a system based on 4G technology, known as the Emergency Services Network (ESN). The ESN was intended to transition from a proprietary system to existing commercial networks, thereby reducing costs. However, the programme has been plagued by overruns and delays, including the requirement to remove Huawei hardware from the system.
Concerns about Airwave date back 24 years to the start of the project, with doubts about security and spiralling costs reported as early as 2000.
In 2014, government CTO Liam Maxwell claimed that the network was costing around £450 million per year to run, whereas a superior system based on modern technology should cost just £70 million.
Airwave has changed hands multiple times since its establishment by BT in 2000 as BT Airwave, to provide a professional mobile radio communications network to the police and other emergency services. Following a series of divestitures and acquisitions, Motorola Solutions completed the acquisition of Airwave in February 2016, but was subsequently accused of increasing fees.
