Immigration spy centre hit by staff delays
Match analysts sans frontières
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The opening of the operations centre at the heart of a new £1.2bn computer system - planned to monitor every person who enters or leaves of the UK - has been delayed by staff training.
The National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC), the Manchester clearing house for the e-Borders programme, was scheduled to open this month. According to the Home Office, it will now begin operations sometime in the first three months of next year.
"The NBTC will be ready later this month but to allow for staff training, it will not be operational until the first quarter of 2010," it said in a statement.
The centre will employ 250 "match analysts" who will judge the strength of computer-generated alerts when a traveller is flagged as suspicious against a domestic or international watch list. They will also decide which law enforcement or intelligence agency each alert should be passed on to.
The Home Office didn't say why training will be completed later than expected.
The minimum educational requirement for a match analyst is two GCSEs. Once their training is complete they will earn less than £15,000. According to the recruitment page, final interviews for the jobs were completed back in early August.
The NBTC will also be staffed by police, SOCA, HMRC and MI5.
The Home Office said that during the match analyst training delays, the e-Borders programme would be run from the Joint Borders Operation Centre (JBOC) at Heathrow.
"In the meantime, it will be business as usual," a spokeswoman said.
Ministers have planned for the e-Borders programme to monitor 95 per cent of journeys into and out of the UK by this time next year. It is being implemented by a private consortium of technology firms led by Raytheon Systems. ®
COMMENTS
Matching by the lowest bidder...
Agree with that; as if 2 GCSEs is going to sufficiently differentiate a candidate from one with 0 GCSEs...
What worries me is the wage offer. I don't want to be pulled up by the cops for invasive cavity searchingness just because someone who wasn't intelligent enough to realise that they could make more cash as a sales assistant in Next didn't realise that I wasn't the same person as Osama bin Pedrodude.
And the sodding icing on the cake is that this is OUR bloody taxes paying for these slack-jawed yokels to finger the button that determines whether WE get fingered by PC Jobsworth looking for our massive stash of coke and semtex that we've supposedly picked up on holiday in the well known terrorist training camps of the 18th arrondissement.
No sir, I don't like this at all.
£300 a week to stop terrorists?
They'll get more in backhanders to let the scum in.
two GCSEs
No wonder the training is taking longer than expected, got to teach them to read and write first!
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