National ID card plans scrapped?

[modeski]

From The Register

"Although the fat lady (or possibly more appropriately, the portly former Home Secretary) has yet to sing on the subject, yesterday's statements from the Home Office to make it a racing certainty that ID cards are dead in this parliamentary administration. The portly former Home Secretary meanwhile has been busy singing denunciations of John Reid's misdeeds in other areas, but will no doubt warble on the sad end of ID cards just as soon as he gets a minute in his busy schedule.

The key points to note are, as we pointed out on Sunday, schedule-related. Yesterday the Home Office said that the introduction of ID cards would be dependent on the review of Home Office operations being carried out at the behest of new Home Secretary John Reid, and a BBC report last night quoted Home Office sources as saying that within this, tendering had been postponed indefinitely. Which is actually saying pretty much the same thing as the official Home Office line, but narrowing the focus - no tendering until the review is complete, nature of tenders to depend on nature of project, nature of project redefined by review - right?

The damage control statements from the Home Office say there's no longer a fixed date, but it's important to get it right and the rollout was always intended to be "an incremental process". This is smoke.

The key aspects of the devastating email leaked on Sunday were that it described a barely achievable design and tendering process aiming for a 2008 date, and that it revealed a half-baked plan for a "variant card" that seemed more likely to wreck development than keep it on the schedule. The schedule described in the email depended on ministerial decisions to be made this month (now not happening) a clear definition of the variant card and associated Temporary National ID Register (not happening), OGC clearance of associated business cases in early 2007 (not happening, no plans, no business cases), advertisement of procurement in the EU Official Journal in March 2007 (nope), with the first cards shipping in 2008. That's clearly not happening either, but it's not just a case of not happening as in missing it by a month, six months, slipping to 2009, but screwed, gone, off the radar unless somebody comes back with a spec for a viable project.

Now, sync the derailed schedule into wider matters. The next election is likely to be in 2010, and even if the men in white coats don't get him sooner, Tony Blair has undertaken to be out of the picture beforehand. So 2009 at the very latest, and Gordon will be really unhappy if it turns out to be that late. The weird variant card was clearly a 'tell you what' measure driven by Blair's absolute determination in the face of all the evidence to have ID cards and to ship them in 2008, and only a further bout of Blair shouting is going to induce the people running the project to even pretend to try to get the first cards out before Blair goes.

So outcomes - Blair accepts he's been overwhelmed by the facts and backs off, or Shouty Blair resumes and a rebodged version collapses some more in the run-up, or even as a contributory factor to, his departure. Whatever, ding dong, the megaglitch is dead.

And next? A more sensible, and desirable Government approach to identity management now has a chance at a look in. And if the ministers who've tagged the LSE Identity Project as Satan's Spawn have all gone, then it might even be possible for their replacements to read and understand the LSE's proposals, and figure out they might be quite helpful. Meanwhile, there may be something in the department of odd coincidences. The Sunday Times claimed senior Treasury sources had passed on the killer email, and it was the representative of the OGC, a Treasury operation, who had the hardest things to say about the state of the ID project. So an assassination, maybe? And yesterday, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the appointment of the chair of the Public-Private Forum on Identity Management, which will "examine evolving technologies" and produce a "preliminary report" for Brown and the Ministerial Committee on Identity Management by "Easter 2007". Factor that one into the schedules, too.

Reidwatch Many things are missing from the Home Office's recent counter-terrorism strategy document, including, in our estimation, anything you could possibly describe as a coherent counter-terrorism strategy. Remarkably though, it doesn't mention ID cards at all, and the only mention of biometrics is in the context of a brief and lukewarm section on biometric visas. Which tells you something about the likely future of ID cards, and maybe indicates that the e-borders train-wreck should be pencilled into diaries.

Blunkettwatch The former Home Secretary we prepared earlier has been having memory trouble again. Soundbiting to BBC radio last night, David Blunkett said that a staged rollout had always been the intention (yeah yeah...) and that it would make sense to issue cards to immigrants and citizens of other EU countries as a first stage. Now, as a former Home Secretary intimately involved in (steady...) the planning of this whole mess, David Blunkett should know that citizens of other EU countries need to be treated equally with UK citizens. Thus, you can't start carding them unless at the very least you've got carding UK citizens scheduled too. Which is, we submit, the current problem, right?"

[Naselus]

Is this really a suprise? The ID card idea has been unpopular, expensive, impractical, and frankly wouldn't actually help in any way whatsoever.

Brown and the Treasury are thoroughly against the whole thing, since it would throw the whole budget into hopeless disarray, and Blair's already toddling toward the door. Better to leave the whole thing alone for a couple of years till the fuss has died down and then drop it completely once Tony's buggered off.

[modeski]

It was kind of surprising to me, but then I don't quite keep up with things the way I did when living in the UK. As far as I was concerned, until recently it was still on the cards (so to speak). It's not one of the reasons that I left the country, rather one reason I was *glad* I left. Ironically enough, they're trying to push for an ID card in Australia now.

To anyone with half a brain cell the whole scheme was, as you say unpopular, expensive and pretty much unworkable - it's just good to know now that the government have pretty much conceded this fact.

[Naselus]

Now just let me stop you there....

The government does not and indeed will not conceed any such thing as the aforementioned statement with regards to the unworkability, unpopularity or inaffordablity of the said vital security measure. There is no reason to believe that it will not go ahead as planned, nor even the beginingss of the remotest concept of the possibility that there shall be some form of concession as previously discussed. Indeed, while there may be considered to be a minor impediment to the smooth and entirely unavoidable deployment of the imperative document, this in no way is a guarantee of the about-face that seems to have been predicted on the matter, and such an enormous and total change in basic policy would be at very least unfeasable and at most an outright slander on the stable and thorough governance that has hitherto been enjoyed with regards to said indetification documentation. However, the government does indeed allow the possibility of a minor and COMPLETELY UNAVOIDABLE hold-up in the proceedings that shall lead us through these times of hardship and into the golden age that will indubitably be heralded by the near-certain expression of our civic freedoms afforded to us by the identification and obsequefication of certain rogue elements that might otherwise walk unhindered through the defences and, indeed, ramifications of our true and great nation.

Or something along those lines. The government hasn't said it's going to ditch the ID card, it just is.

[HStorm]

naselus said:

The government does not and indeed will not conceed any such thing as the aforementioned statement with regards to the unworkability, unpopularity or inaffordability of the said vital security measure.

I'm afraid you've got that completely wrong. It's unaffordability, not inaffordability.

I suspect the Government realised several years ago that ID cards were a dumb idea and that they'd announced it before they'd thought it through. They just haven't been able to find a way of dropping the scheme which won't require admitting that they'd acted like a bunch of reactionary cretins in the first place. Which they undoubtedly are.

[modeski]

Ah well, at least it'll be a few years yet before all newborns are implanted with RFID chips and entered into Skynet.

Just you wait.