The news continues the fallout from a weekend report that
quoted senior officials suggesting that the scheme is in crisis.
One email from a senior Treasury official to a senior Home Office
colleague published in recent days said: "what benchmark in the
Home Office do we have that suggests this is even remotely
feasible?"
The programme is suffering severe delays. After the ID card
legislation was passed in spring, suppliers expected to be invited
to tender immediately. That process will now not begin until the
end of this year and no formal date has even been set. A Home
Office spokesman told OUT-LAW that a formal date for tendering had
never been set.
The Sunday Times revealed an email exchange that had been leaked
to it between David Foord, Mission Critical Director at the Office
of Government Commerce in the Treasury and Peter Smith, acting
Commercial Director at the Home Office's Identity and Passport
Service.
"Even if everything went perfectly (which it will not) it is
very debatable (given performance of government ICT [computing]
projects) whether whatever TNIR [the National Identity Register]
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 government and industry to run two
overlapping procurements," wrote Foord to Smith. "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."
The Home Office said that it did not believe that the programme
was in trouble. When asked was the email exchange not a sign that
there was trouble a spokesman said that it did not comment on
leaked emails.
One problem identified by the officials was that the project was
being dictated by political concerns and not a reasonable
perception of reality. "Just because ministers say 'do something'
does not mean we ignore reality – which is what seems to have
happened on ID Cards," wrote Foord. "I really want to be sure that
what IPS [the passport service] intends to do is based on the real
world."
Critics say they have known for some time that the project was
deeply troubled. "This has revealed that what they are trying to do
is down completely to a political agenda, not to a common sense
agreement about what ID cards should do," said Phil Booth, national
co-ordinator of anti-card group No2ID. "It is clear that they had a
particular idea about what a central database would do, that it
would hold everything about you your life history."
"This is something which nobody, including suppliers we've
talked to, is sure that there is a technical ability to do. So they
will build a huge database and spend hundreds of millions or
billions of pounds on something that is a fantasy. It is utterly
delusional. The civil servants don't think it can be done, the
suppliers don't think it can be done. This is going to collapse
under its own weight," said Booth.
"The delays to the ID cards scheme announced today come as no
surprise to LSE’s Identity Project team," said London School of
Economics academic Dr Edgar Whitley, who co-ordinates The Identity
Project there. "Our 300-page report last year warned the government
that its proposals were high risk. Given repeated statements from
Home Office ministers about detailed costings and clear plans for
the scheme we are alarmed at the extent of the problems revealed
over the past few days."
The emails revealed that Prime Minister Tony Blair has asked for
a scaled down version of the cards to be made available so that the
project can meet his target of a 2008 launch.
Booth said that some passport service tenders issued last week
underlined the feeling that the ID card project was disintegrating.
"It looks like the IPS is trying to separate out the two things,
the passports and the ID cards," he said. "The Home office has
always said that ID cards and passports were intimately linked,
that you can't have passports without ID cards and that the
national ID registry was connected to passports. Then all of a
sudden they are putting out tenders that put blue sky between the
two things."
His view was supported by some of the leaked email
correspondence. Smith from the passport service wrote in early
June: "the procurements we will (we hope) launch in the next few
months – not the TNIR but things like APSS and contact centre – are
all necessary (essential) to sustain IPS business as usual, and 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."
A Home Office statement said: "We have already introduced the
first generation of biometric passports and begun introducing
biometric visas for foreign nationals. As part of the Home Office
review we are ensuring that the sequencing of our plans is coherent
and addresses the priorities of British citizens. We have always
made clear that its introduction would be in states and would be an
incremental process and that remains the position."
