Bill Crothers, CIO of the Identity and Passport Service
(IPS), and its chief executive, James Hall,
tell it like it is. Sometimes when officials talk to journalists
they know immediately what the reporter wants to write - and they
confuse, deliberately or not. Crothers and Hall are not like that.
Two things were clear to us at the outset - before the interview -
and were still clear afterwards.
The first is that if the Conservatives win the next general
election and cancel ID cards there will be little in effect to
cancel. The IT infrastructure for passports is being combined with
that of ID cards. So the £650m worth of contracts awarded this week
to CSC and IBM for new ID cards and passports IT will remain
largely intact.
A new biometric system is, in any case, being built by IBM - the
National Biometric Information Service (NBIS), which will store
fingerprints and pictures of faces.
Under its new £265m 10-year contract IBM will take over the
Immigration Automated Fingerprinting System from French company
Sagem, which has been running the system for the UK Border Agency.
The NBIS system will be needed for asylum seekers and visa
applications whether or not the ID cards scheme is cancelled.
Likewise, CSC, under its £385m 10-year contract, is building a
new IT infrastructure for ID cards and passports. It will be
retained whether ID cards are cancelled or not.
So if the Tories cancel ID cards, the scheme can be re-instated
without too much trouble.
The second thing, is that it is going to be increasingly
difficult to separate the costs of producing passports and ID
cards. The Treasury requires the Identity and Passport Service to
be self-funding, which means that it can charge the public whatever
it takes to ensure there are no losses. ID cards and passports
share almost the same IT infrastructure.
So as more money is spent on ID cards the cost must be recovered
from fees. It is politically unacceptable to charge too much for ID
cards; few people would want to buy them. But the market for new
and replacement passports is big and captive. There is also the
potential to charge the public to have changes of addresses made on
the new systems.
The official explanation for passport fee increases will always
be that they are needed to cover the cost of more security to get
in line with US and European requirements.
But that argument goes only so far. The internal cost of
producing each passport - called the unit cost - was about £15 in
1999 - and this was expected to fall with the advent of new
technology. Indeed, there was talk in 1999 that the Treasury would
allow the Passport Service, on the basis of a £15 unit cost, to
make a profit.
Since then there have been many fee increases, leaving one to
wonder whether the cost of ID cards is being subsidised by passport
fee increases.
The Identity and Passport Service denies that passport fees have
been increased to cover the cost of ID cards, but its spokesman
conceded that passport fees will in future cover the cost of the
combined ID cards/passport infrastructure. That makes it highly
possible that there will be, one day not too soon, a £200 passport
fee. Already the cost to the public of a passport has risen from
£28 in 1999 to between £72 and £114 today.
Computer Weekly has asked the Home Office for details of the
unit cost under the Freedom of Information Act, which the Home
Office has rejected. It is a sensitive issue because internal
papers on the unit costs might show how the IPS could produce an
excess of income from its charges for passports to cover the cost
of the ID cards scheme.
A spokesman for the Home Office told Computer Weekly, "Identity
and Passport Service passport production is self-funding and
reliant on the fee income it generates. Rises in recent years have
paid for security improvements to the passport, including
interviews for first-time adult applications and biometric-enabled
passports. Passport fees do not currently subsidise the programme
to introduce ID cards.
"Passport fees are reviewed annually with HM Treasury and are
set to ensure that IPS breaks even and recovers the total cost of
producing passports.
"In the long-term it is our intention to continue to break even
by recovering the operational costs of the National Identity Scheme
from the fees generated by the issuing of ID cards and
passports."
More on ID cards from Tony Collins' IT Projects
blog
Gateway reviews on ID Cards - one impressive, one not
>>
Office of Government Commerce publishes two Gateway reviews
>>