Robin Wilton's esoterica

As this BBC news story indicates, the latest of the 6-monthly cost forecasts required under the ID Cards Bill has just been published. It took me a while to find the document itself, though, so here's a link to save you the bother.

Many years ago I worked in a Technical Support organisation which was reputed (a little unfairly) to be somewhat hard to deal with. Someone once pithily described it as "providing all assistance short of actual help". Well, that's rather how I feel about these 6-monthly cost forecasts. They probably fulfil the letter of the requirements laid out by the Bill, but if anything I've been told about policymakers is true, few if any of them will have the time or the inclination to work through these reports and turn the various sets of tabulated and charted figures into useful decision support material. As they stand, they are not very helpful.

To give a couple of examples:

- the BBC story reports the bottom-line news that, over-all, the projected cost of the scheme has risen by £71m to £5.612bn. You might think that those numbers would appear somewhere as a summary line-item in the report, but they don't. In fact, they don't appear anywhere in it. To derive them for yourself, you have to take one figure from one of three tables describing costs relating to British and Irish citizens resident in the UK (on page 10) and another figure from one of three tables describing the "incremental estimated resource costs for providing ID cards to foreign nationals applying to extend their leave in the UK" (on page 14) and add them together, then do the same for the previous estimates and compare the two.

- there's also a table (helpfully oriented at 90% to the page layout) which sets out the estimated costs, year by year over the next 10 years, of providing ID Cards and Passports to UK citizens. It has three lines: one for passport-only costs, one for ID Card-only costs, and one for common costs. Good as far as it goes, but this illustrates two things.

First, there continues to be a highly confusing degree of intersection between the costs relating to a discretionary document (the passport) which must meet requirements set out by ICAO - an international body of which the UK is a member - and the costs relating to the UK identity card - a to all intents compulsory credential to be issued to UK standards. The practical argument for separating these two schemes entirely is almost certainly stronger than the one for combining them - but that's not the same as the policy argument for combining them.

Second, again, the raw data can be useful, but it could be much more so. A few years ago, for reasons I've never fathomed, I started receiving a bulletin with Bank of England exchange rate forecasts in it, laid out both in figures and as a graph. The graph showed an 'expected exchange rate', modified by various percentages. The further out the forecasts went in time, the wider the percentage bands became. Over-all, the graph looked rather like a fan opening out from left to right. At a glance, one could see the expected future rate, the most optimistic and pessimistic forecasts, and the various bandings in between.

The same principle could very easily be applied to the ID Card costings, to cover both forecast data and the historical record of 'expected versus actual' estimates - but it is not. The result is a needlessly complicated snapshot which provides neither an 'at a glance' summary of current status, nor useful information about how reliable previous forecasts have been.

I can't see it being of any real use to policymakers... but then, thinking back to yesterday's post, perhaps it isn't meant to be.