Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the Windrush scandal, whether the Government has identified any risks associated with the use of the Biometric Services Gateway system and its potential impact on communities around the UK.

The Biometrics Services Gateway (BSG) is a technological solution implemented by the Home Office Biometrics (HOB) Programme to provide a “common front door” into the legacy biometric systems and services.

The BSG facilitates the exchange of data between biometric systems and in doing so, supports a range of biometric business processes, such as visa enrolments, asylum applications and criminal police searches, by routing biometric data between and on behalf of the systems. The BSG 'front door' to HOB services:

• Reduces the complexity of the IT environment by introducing standards and common formats.
• Reduces the future cost of integration between HOB and other systems/services.
• Reduces ongoing run costs and increases system robustness, resilience and security of data

The BSG is one component of the HOB technical architecture and only sends data to the biometrics systems; it does not make decisions based on the biometric data.