Robin Wilton's esoterica

« UK Identity Card... | Main | "Ideal Government"... »

25 May · Wed 2005

Oh boy... it's as bad as I thought.

Well, it's hard to get the details I would like to see, just from the press coverage, but there are several phrases in the available reports which I find really unnerving. Here's the initial BBC article: Blair Defends Identity Card Plan Alarming statement #1: The Home Office will not put a figure on the cost of setting up the scheme, saying it is commercially sensitive. Hold on a minute: the "commercially sensitive" argument is used to, for example, avoid disclosing under the Freedom of Information Act details like the cost of a contract awarded under competitive tendering. If this legislation is only now going through parliament, how can commercial vendors have already reached the stage where they have competitive tenders or contracts to run the resulting system? This is a legislative measure which parliamentarians have described as "fundamentally changing the relationship between the citizen and the state". I think it's quite unacceptable to be trotting out a "commercially sensitive" defence against disclosing the cost case. Alarming statement #2: But the scheme will cost an estimated £584m to run every year - a cost of £93 per card, compared with an estimated cost of £85 per card in November. So, in return for being issued with a credential which (as it contains biometrics) should remain consistent as long as the biometrics do, I could have to pay £93 a year in perpetuity, and presumably more as usage of the card becomes pervasive and the cost of operating the over-all system rises accordingly. If the benefits of a national ID card are (as the Government has been saying so far) improved management of benefit fraud, healthcare entitlements, immigration and asylum, then (to put it baldly) what's in it for me? A more cynical person than myself might wonder if that's why Mr Blair and others have suddenly started referring to the ID Card as "a defence against identity theft". Elsewhere I'll come back to why I think that's a bogus characterisation... Alarming statement #3: 'The prime minister's spokesman said ... "People are recognising that identity is just as valuable as possessions," This statement is alarming because it perpetuates the erroneous view that an identity equates to a possession. If identity is a possession, then it is a very special class of one, and needs to be legally treated like other possessions of the same kind (such as real estate). This is something I discussed in more detail in this earlier blog entry: Give me back my identity! I understand that what I have done here is in no way a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the bill and how it has changed, but to my mind, these three examples are enough to seriously undermine my confidence (!) in it.

Posted by racingsnake @ 03:39 PM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [3] ]

Comments:

Hmm... On alarming 1 - disclosing the cost of implementation gives the suppliers an indication of how much to bid. i know we're talking billions here, but the less the suppliers know about home office wallet dimension, the better. alarming 2- i've seen nothing that says the £93 is per year. it's a one off payment - like a passport (so maybe every 10 years rather than really one-off) - not a tv licence-style "right to live" payment. alarming 3 - identity as a posession. agree and disagree with your point. the fact that people start to think of their identity as something that can be taken from them means it's more akin to a posession; that can only be a good thing because it might mean people are more cautious with their credit cards, their pin numbers etc. on your wider point, about it being a special kind of posession, i agree.

Posted by AlanM on May 28, 2005 at 08:27 AM GMT+00:00 #

Alan - thanks for those. There's obviously something a bit odd about the initial figures I quoted... for instance, if you divide the total cost by the cost per card, you get a card population of just over 6m, which is probably a bit low ;^)
On the question of cost and confidentiality: first, there's a chicken-and-egg thing here. If the Home Office really don't know how much it will cost, then committing to go ahead with the scheme seems premature. If they do know, then I think there is a clear public interest in making that figure available, at least at a "budgetary and planning" level.
I am still very uneasy about the use of the 'commercially sensitive' exemption to hide information about public sector expenditure, as opposed to protecting the legitimate commercial interests of companies involved in competitive tendering.
And yes, people should be encouraged to think of their identities as something which can be compromised... but it's very dangerous to think that a compromised ID can 'simply' be replaced. That's the mind-set I want to pre-empt.
Thanks again! Keep 'em coming...

Posted by Robin Wilton on May 31, 2005 at 11:16 AM GMT+00:00 #

As AlanM noted, there's something awry in the assumptions I've cited concerning the cost of ID Cards.
So far, I can't see any way of getting a plausible card population from the figures given.
One other point is that it's not clear <em>how much</em> of a £93 annual cost a citizen would be expected to bear.
If anyone has details, please post a comment or email me....

Posted by Robin Wilton on May 31, 2005 at 01:16 PM GMT+00:00 #

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
« December 2009
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Today