Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when his Department moved from paper to digital for immigration status records.

INDECS (the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Department Electronic Computer system) held LC (landing cards) information for arriving passengers at UK ports of entry given check out conditions on arrival (codes 1-4) since 1980. On 14 April 1998, ports ceased to endorse passports or issue/collect embarkation cards on passengers' departure from the UK. These were then made available through the Case Information Database (CID).

CID was delivered through a phased rollout that was initiated with Asylum cases and was then subsequently rolled out to cater for settlement, enforcement and nationality case working processes as well as assisting Borders. CID has been the source immigration case working system for UKVI since 1998, over this time however the department has digitised application routes through a web-based service called Access UK and are in the process of replacing CID functionality with a new product named ATLAS. Please note that paper files are used alongside these systems to aid case working processes