Robin Wilton's esoterica

The Conservative party has started to campaign more actively against the current ID Card plans, with measures including this website (plus petition), and a letter to potential suppliers from Shadow Home Secretary David Davis. The letter also went to Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary.

It's a pretty direct letter; it opens with a reference to the Conservatives' "unqualified" intent to cancel the ID Cards project should they gain power at the next election. It says that in the interests of '"courtesy and transparency", potential vendors may wish to evaluate their involvement carefully, in the light of this risk.

It closes by noting that a vendor "company's reputation is unlikely to be enhanced through involvement in a project, which squanders an enormous amount of public money in this way."

It has prompted a reply from John Higgins, director-general of UK IT trade association Intellect; among other things, he says:

"This public policy debate took place and was voted upon in Parliament. As an industry we are now working hard with the Identity and Passport Service to ensure that the ID cards procurement results in solutions which are practical and deliverable. To this end, we believe it is wholly inappropriate for the industry to be used as a mechanism for scoring political points.

Moreover, it is highly likely that the manner of this intervention will undermine the confidence of the supplier community in any future Conservative Government honouring other contractual commitments which may have been entered into by previous administrations. It will potentially make companies wary of entering into any public sector contracts at all."

Two things about this strike me as slightly strange.

First, if a government which commits to do one thing is voted out of office by a party which has committed to do the opposite, the idea that the latter needs to be bound by the contractual commitments of its predecessor is an odd one, isn't it?

Second, John Higgins appears to be at odds with one of his directors, Nick Kalisperas. According to the IT Week article I linked to right at the top:

IT trade association Intellect did not expect the Conservative campaign to
have much effect on IT suppliers, however.

“The letter is not likely to put off suppliers interested in bidding for ID
projects,” said Intellect director Nick Kalisperas. “They were already aware of
any risk factors involved.” 

Mr Davis' acknowledgement of Mr Higgins' letter has now been posted on a couple of websites including this one. It is, if anything, more forthright than the initial missive:

"I have received your letter of 6th February.

Your claim to be "neither for, nor against the policy of introducing ID cards in the UK", given the clear commercial interest of a number of your members, is simply disingenuous.

Your dismissal of the serious objections of principle we have to ID cards as point-scoring demonstrates a failure to appreciate either the parameters of the public debate on ID cards or the depth of opposition.

I am afraid that your claim that an honest assertion of our intentions is somehow indicative of a general commercial bad faith is both incredible and insulting.

Your thinly veiled threat of penalty clauses, at taxpayer's expense, is inappropriate and ill-judged. As the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has frequently recommended - certainly since my chairmanship - large IT projects should be segmented into several contractual phases to protect against the risks involved. I attach a copy of the PAC's 1999 Report, 'Improving the Delivery of Government IT Projects', which you might benefit from reading.

We are already fully engaged with the IT sector on these issues - and in my previous role as PAC chairman I was only too familiar with the IT sector's successes and failures in delivery of public services. You may be sure that we will have learned from those experiences."

Arguably, the more productive course of action for a self-avowed high-tech trade association might be to offer advice on best practice in the implementation of what they have to offer. At any rate, the reactions I've seen so far to Mr Higgins' letter do little to persuade me that it has advanced the interests of the industry.