Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

My blogging colleague Philip Virgo has pointed out the differences in thoroughness between two gateway reviews on the ID Cards scheme. Last month the Office of Government Commerce published the two Gateway reviews - as an "exception" it said.
 
The first gateway zero review was carried out in June 2003; the second Gateway zero in January 2004.

Philip Virgo says the first review was a strategic assessment and quite a good one. The second review was not so thorough.  

CSC has won a £385m 10-year contract to build new passport and ID systems, and take over about 350 IT staff who are working on various contracts at the Identity and Passport Service. Most of them will transfer to CSC from Siemens.  

I asked Bill Crothers, CIO at the Identity and Passport Service, whether CSC's work on the NHS's NPfIT programme had been looked at. He said that the IPS took up references in the public and private sectors for the four shortlisted suppliers CSC, IBM, Fujitsu and Thales. References were taken up with NHS Connecting for Health over the NPfIT.

Crothers said:"We are comfortable with their [CSC's] capability and their capacity to staff up [the project] in an appropriate way."

When senior officials are interviewed by journalists they usually pick up almost immediately what story the reporter wants to write and may sometimes try to confuse; it can also work the other way. 

If the reporter puts to the officials overly positive - oily - questions, the officials may laden their assurances with caveats, pointing out the many complexities, uncertainties, risks and challenges.

So it was good to talk earlier this week to Bill Crothers, CIO of the Identity and Passport Service and its chief executive James Hall.  They tell it like it is. Two things were clear to me at the outset - before the interview - and were still clear afterwards. 

1) 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 which were awarded this week to CSC and IBM for new ID Cards and passports IT will remain largely intact. 

2) The costs of ID Cards are likely to be met, to a large extent, by passport fee increases.

The Government's preoccupation with surveillance of the people means that terrorists, drug dealers and investigative journalists have something in common. Charles Arthur in The Guardian points out that they will, as a rule, avoid using electronic media when communicating with their contacts.

Which means that the Government is amassing personal informaiton on various databases, and setting up numerous surveillance systems, to watch the citizens who are largely law abiding.

On BBC R4's Today programme on Monday I spoke of how IT suppliers successfully lobby for new work, with the result that ministers and their advisers are kept busy with proposals for new surveillance schemes such as the one to monitor all emails, phone calls, and use of social networks including twitter and facebook.

When an IT scheme costs too much to declare openly, officials sometimes present to Parliament the partial costs only.

So when an MP asked for the costs of the Defence Information Infrastructure he was told £2.3bn. He was not told that this estimate was the first phase only. The scheme in fact was projected to cost £7bn, which Parliament discovered only years later.

Similarly the NHS IT scheme was announced as costing £2.3bn in 2002. Internally, the Department of Health had costed the scheme at £5bn but kept the evidence of the estimate hidden. Now it's due to cost at least £12.7bn.

With ID Cards it's a bit different. When the virtuosos of spin want to make the costs of a project seem small they tend to express the costs as annual amounts or over a period of say three years.

When they want to make the financial benefits of a scheme seem large, they gather in a heap the savings over a long period of say 10 years.

The Home Office has gone way beyond this in a report which it has published today.

The Economist on ID Cards.

Article in Daily Telegraph which mentions our claim that the cost of passports is heading toward £200 to pay for ID Cards technolgy, and that the ID Cards scheme is a problem looking for a solution.

Link:

Are passport fees paying for ID Cards? - Computer Weekly

Heading towards the £200 passport - IT projects blog

D Telegraph article

At a breakfast with business leaders last week Jacqui Smith gave a presentation on ID Cards and sounded, well, humble. 

She confirmed her confidence in ID Cards technology: a roll-out of the scheme will begin in Manchester later this year. At times her voice croaked. 

She has had the arrogance that nearly always seems to go with ministership knocked out of her by the media coverage of her second-home claim and her husband's decision to put the cost of the two adult movies on her parliamentary expenses.

In her speech she didn't have the "we-can-do-what-we-like" haughtiness which characterizes some secretaries of state.

These are 10 things about ID Cards from a little-reported Home Office document, "Identity Cards Act Secondary Legislation - An Impact Assessment", which was published this month and might not have been known generally.

The full article is on ComputerWeekly.com.

1) ID card-holders can be fined if they fail to update information held about them on the National Identity Register (NIR).

2) An individual's entry on the NIR can be given to "government departments or other public sector organisations without the consent of the individual provided they [departments and agencies] have been approved to do so by parliament under secondary legislation".

3) The Home Office will allow ID cardholders to check the information held on them on the NIR.

The Home Office has commissioned a promotional film on ID Cards, which has been professionally produced, complete with its own music.

It cleverly depicts ID Cards as if they were a range of luxury perfumes or designer suits.

It was shown to a select group of business leaders earlier this month, during a presentation on ID Cards by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. The Home Office wants business leaders to invest in technology that will enable high street retailers to collect fingerprints and digital photos for ID Cards and passports, and help citizens apply for them.

New passport applicants face questions on their credit card debts

This article on Computer Weekly's homepage reports on a decision of the Office of Government Commerce to publish the recommendations and RAG - red, amber, green - statuses of 23 Government high-risk IT projects and programmes, three years after I'd requested them.

This is the OGC's full FOI response: ogcresponse.pdf

Computer Weekly article

"...We remain convinced that Fujitsu's position is not symptomatic of a broader decline at the top end of the UK IT services market. Recent good progress from other major players such as IBM (£265 million - National Identity Scheme), HP/EDS (£1 billion - Aviva), Capgemini (12.7% growth in 1H09) and CSC (£385 million - National Identity Scheme) show that there is still life in the market for big deals in both the public and commercial sectors...