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Underground > Switchboard >

UK Civil Servants preparing for ID cards to be 'canned completely'

Happy Dave Has Left

08:20 / 10.07.06

This exchange of emails gladdens my soul considerably, but I have to wonder, are those in government completely unable to see how dangerous ID cards could be? And who on earth thought the idea of proposing a 'face-saving variant scheme' involving just a biometric register had any merit whatsoever? How the hell do you biometrically scan fifty million people in two years, and why would you do it simply to save face?

Kiltartan Cross

09:45 / 10.07.06

How the hell do you biometrically scan fifty million people in two years?

Badly...

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:11 / 10.07.06

why would you do it simply to save face?

Because once you're out of Government and earning much more money as a board member on one of those companies you were so helpful to when you were in Government you aren't held responsible for your past mistakes.

Say, for example, that a Bill was passed forcing some sort of financial or civil liability on the ministers responsible for them. Although no MP would ever support a bill it would certainly make all subsequent bills a lot more timid and probably better designed.

Support for ID Cards amongst those that actually give a crap (therefore excluding most of the British population) is down to the last few people. Unfortunately those people are all in the Labour Party and most of them are in the Cabinet and are the ones that say whether this scheme goes ahead or not.

Not in the Face

15:49 / 10.07.06

One reason might be for the amount of work that will already have gone into the back office part of the scheme - the linking up of the many govt databases that the card was symbolised. The e-mails seem to refer to the problems of getting the cards themselves working and getting everyone scanned in not how far this work is progressing.

A lot of that work will presumably have already gotten underway to anticipate the government's requirements - especially as the govt was so unwilling to amend its plans. I can imagine that creating a great of impetus within the system that might be hard to stop, short of a complete government rejection of the scheme.

More lightly, I can't help but wish the Times has done a one letter typo in the name of "David Foord, the ID card project director at the Office of Government Commerce".

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:30 / 10.07.06

There's no reason they can't go on with that, my understanding was that that was already on the cards/underway before ID Cards were brought up. Then when they were, some bright spark suggested, "hey! We can link these two schemes up!"

However, the behind-the-scenes record work was, IIRC, started by the Chancellor's office. You don't suppose this ridiculous continuation of the ID Card scheme is based purely on the PM's dislike for Brown do you?

09:10 / 11.07.06

This is a very pertinent (and chilling, even for people who are already aware of the issues, which I think most of us are) article in the Guardian by Henry Porter, on the subject of ID cards and the NIR. Have a horrible feeling that the horse has already well and truly bolted.

13:56 / 11.07.06

Great bit from that article;
"Something enormous and revolutionary is about to happen to us. We are giving the most precious part of ourselves to the government, allowing it complete freedom to roam through our privacy. And it's not just to this government, but to the governments of the future, the nature of which we cannot possibly know."

18:36 / 11.07.06

One thing that the Blair Govt and the Bush Govt share is an adversion to reality. They avoid questions like 'how the hell do you make a system like this reliable using unproven and untested technology like biometrics' and 'we've never been able to make a large scale govt run IT project come in on time and on budget so how are we going to with this one'.

But the good thing is that at least some civil servants know what they're doing and can see the gaping holes, hope the leakers never get found as they're actually doing their jobs.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

19:16 / 12.07.06

The Register are confident that ID Cards are dead. Blair insists oh no they're not. But his backing is increasingly looking like the backing he gave Blunkett or Clarke... right up to the point they weren't in their posts any more.

23:13 / 14.07.06

Ding dong the witch is dead, la la la laa, la la la laa.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:25 / 15.07.06

This relates to what exactly?

08:36 / 15.07.06

The end of ID cards?? Just a spontaneous expression of joy, forgive me.

17:14 / 16.07.06

It seems that my joy was a little premature. I saw Tone on a local politics show today and he said that not only were ID cards as much a part of gov. plans as they had ever been, there would be no slowing down of the planned delivery.

Looks like the struggle goes on.

Tryphena Absent

17:42 / 16.07.06

At this rate they're not going to be in government long enough to carry those plans through.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

06:02 / 17.07.06

They could be in Government long enough that should the Tories get in at the next election they'll have no choice but to continue with it. It's like Freedom of Information- New Labour were for it... rrrright up to the point they were in Government, then realised how handy the Official Secrets Act was. And the Dome, it was a costly white elephant... rrrright up to the point they were in Government, then it was a wonderful thing.

It took the Tories long enough to remember they are supposed to be a party of small government (I can't remember whether they'd decided to be against it yet before the last General Election but certainly in the initial stages of the suggestion of ID Cards they were supportive) and so oppose it, there seems to be a strange reluctance for one Government to just toss away the half-baked schemes of a previous one.

08:12 / 17.07.06

Well, in many cases they can't, because of commercial contracts etc. (or rather, they don't want to - c.f. the railways - they can renationalise them when necessary but they don't want to because it doesn't fit the PPP/PFI plan to which this government including Gordon Brown is totally in thrall).

However, if Blair goes before the contracts are in place on this one, his successor might be able to call it off - I can't imagine that anyone in government seriously thinks the plan would run to schedule, especially since it is bound to be contracted out to one or more of the usual PFI/PPP contractors who mostly have long records of stuffing things up (e.g. EDS, Capita - see recent Private Eyes). So the important thing would be the attitude of Blair's successor towards PFI/PPP as well as big government - I think it's pretty clear that at the moment someone who explicitly wants to carry on with Blair's policies won't be very popular with large portions of the party, so...

It seems obvious that they'd do better to can it now rather than half-way through when the scheme turns out to be shambolic, way over budget and years late, the cards not to work, fraud to increase, the databases to assign criminal records and debt to the wrong people, etc. etc. Whether they have enough nous to do so is another matter.

Tryphena Absent

10:36 / 17.07.06

I think they're going to hold it off until the leadership election, the next person will say they're considering its viability, suspend it indefinitely and they'll let the tories decide what to do when they get in.

12:25 / 17.07.06

I saw a brief piece in the Observer by Nick Cohen saying that Brown had refused Treasury funding for the cards scheme - anyone else seen anything on this? last I knew was just that he hadn't given his backing.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:26 / 17.07.06

I'm not sure there's much difference between the two states, but yes, I think it's more likely that ID Cards will get kilfiled if there's a change of Labour leader, not so much if the Tories get in.