Using Data to Secure 

the UK Border

The 2025 UK Border Strategy aims to create the most effective border in the world, one that embraces innovation, simplifies processes for traders and travellers, and improves the security and biosecurity of the UK.

 

But turning this vision into reality isn’t easy. Border Force is tasked with keeping borders safe 24/7, including airports, ports, the Channel Tunnel and nearly 8,000 miles of coastline. This involves gathering intelligence, searching baggage, vehicles and cargo, and checking the immigration status of people arriving or departing.

 

Border staff also need to be able to identify unknown entities of interest and new patterns and trends; understand the holistic risk and threat assessment to inform priorities; and come up with innovative ways to rapidly create and access these essential insights. Given that there are over 300 million passenger journeys each year alone, the scale of the challenge is clear.

 

Achieving these aims requires the efficient use and sharing of data. When used well, data leads to public services that respond to users’ needs and decisions that lead to better real-time results. For example, the power of technology and data analytics can help prevent someone or something boarding a plane, train, or boat as far away as Sydney or as close as the Coquelles freight terminal near Calais.

 

But in a world of ever-increasing data and data volumes it is hard to not get lost in the noise. At BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, it’s our mission to decipher that data to provide real insight to help those who protect us.

 

 

Here at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence we support UK Border Force in its guiding mission to create the most effective border in the world. In these videos, we explore why the efficient use and sharing of data is so vital. We also examine how our data analytics capability for real time risk assessment spans the cross-border movement of people and freight. Created by a joint Home Office-BAE Systems team, it fuses data from across the Home Office and wider government with that of commercial organisations to enable intelligence-led risk assessments. 

 

 

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