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ID cards: the truth
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Leaked Government Emails Predict Delays And Failure For ID Scheme9 July 2006 Leaked emails show that the senior civil servants in charge of implementing ID cards & the National Identity Register think that the government's plans are completely unrealistic. The ID scheme is shown to be hopelessly delayed and Tony Blair wants a face-saving cut-down version of the ID card to be introduced first to mask the delays and problems. However, the fight against ID cards isn't won yet - the Passport Agency's long-term plans for gathering greater information about passport applicants via interviews, adding biometrics & RFID chips to passports, and rolling out dozens of new 'processing' centres, are all deeply tied into the ID registration scheme. The leaked emails: from Email from David Foord of the Office of Government Commerce to Peter Smith, acting commercial director of the Identity and Passport Service: "This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality. ... even if everything went perfectly (which it will not) it is very debatable (given performance of Govt ICT projects) whether whatever TNIR turns out to be (and that is a worry in itself) can be procured, delivered, tested and rolled out in just over two years and whether the resources exist within Govt and industry to run two overlapping procurements. What benchmark in the Home Office do we have that suggests that this is even remotely feasible?
I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail. This is based on:
my conversations with stakeholders about:
the amount of rethinking going on about identity management (which at best will provide an agreed vision and some signposts by end July),
read the rest of the leaked emails Analysis & implications of the emails: from The UK ID card scheme is doomed to fail, and an attempt to put a face-saving downscaled version into place threatens to wreck the project sooner, rather than later, according to civil service correspondence ...
... Foord produces the most detailed damnation of the state of the scheme, revealing that currently it has no approved business case, and describing the construction and approval of one by March 2007 as "a reasonable target but by no means guaranteed." It appears that the two civil servants (writing in early June) were trying to thrash out achievable objectives that could put the ID procurement programme back on track. We can presume from the correspondence that Blair and the Home Office were at this time aware that the scheme as planned was in deep trouble and would need to be pushed back by several years, but that Blair's insistence on having the first ID cards in place by 2008 had resulted in the early variant, together with the construction of a nebulous TNIR (Temporary National Identity Register, apparently) to do service prior to the actual NIR being ready to roll...
...Smith says he shares Foord's concerns about the TNIR timescale, that it was "a Mr Blair who wanted the 'early variant' card. Not my idea", and reveals that although procurements that will allow IPS "business as usual" to continue, TNIR is not part of these... "we are designing the strategy so that they are all sensible and viable contracts in their own right EVEN IF the ID Card gets canned completely. So also less dependence on business case approval etc."
Timing is here worth considering in more detail. The two are clearly discussing the scheme's problems because these have been exposed by the need to advertise procurements in the EU Official Journal (OJEU), and no spec means no ad, so no contractors and no project. But revised planning towards an approved business case and commencement of procurement by March 2007 quite clearly doesn't leave sufficient time for the 2008 ship date to be achieved. Blair will therefore have been told this prior to the beginning of June, but must have insisted on 2008, and the cut-down "variant" will have been decided on at that time. Note that in late May Blair was loudly nailing his colours to ID cards as the fix for all his immigration problems. That, we submit, was a man refusing to bend in the face of reason, not one preparing the ground for a face-saving climb-down ...
...While it might seem bizarre that the Government has spent several years pushing through an ID card scheme, while an "agreed vision" on how it should approach identity management has yet to be completed, that is precisely the situation. Over the years in which the Government has been insisting on a super-centralised approach to ID, brighter people in Whitehall have been slowly gaining the intellectual upper hand. The need to accommodate the planned ID scheme and its ship dates does however mean there's a very strong probability that the "vision" will still turn out to be somewhat maimed...
...The strong possibility of an early death for the ID scheme, however, still leaves troubling aspects to IPS' "business as usual" plans. The organisation formerly known as the Passport Service has over the past few years been roadmapping the ID scheme into its long-range business plans. The removal of ID cards from the equation would therefore still leave the other ID scheme under construction, and it could not be readily disentangled from Passport Service planning without a conscious, politically-driven change of strategy. So it isn't over by a long chalk.
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