The start of the procurement for the £2bn national identity card scheme this month finally kicks off one of the more controversial public sector IT programmes of recent years.

None of the contract details published by the Home Office’s Identity and Passport Service (IPS) add much to the debate about whether the cards are necessary and what they will be used for in practice.

But the way the commercial arrangements are being designed hints at the lessons learned from past IT disasters.

‘ID cards are a really important piece of national infrastructure that require a large-scale, long-term business transformation programme,’ said IPS commercial director Bill Crothers.

‘We have looked extensively at positive and negative experiences to make sure that we will deliver to the right cost, to the right schedule, and with the right quality.’

Critics say the changes have not gone far enough, but the ID scheme is no longer the monolithic behemoth it once was.

The revised strategy, published last December, described a plan to reuse the existing Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) citizen information system rather than build the planned National Identity Register from scratch.

The procurement plan published last week suggests the IPS hopes the scheme will be a wholly modern IT programme.

It will be a wide-ranging infrastructure platform, rather than a single big-bang implementation. It will be built on and into existing government systems, and is to be used for both internationally-required biometric passports and the ID needs of the wider public sector as envisaged by Sir David Varney, the prime minister’s adviser on public service delivery.

The contractual arrangements also reflect the latest thinking on how to make government IT work.

The ID cards tendering process now getting under way is for a series of framework agreements expected to be signed with up to five major suppliers.

Firms who make it onto the list will then be eligible to bid in a series of so-called ‘mini competitions’ for the individual pieces of work making up the programme.

The frameworks are expected to be signed within nine months and to handle £2bn worth of secondary contracts.

Framework deals are nothing new. But what is new for Whitehall is an arrangement which contractually requires suppliers winning individual deals to co-operate with one another. Those that do not meet the requirement will be dropped from the programme.

‘There will be formal incentives to co-operate enshrined commercially, with sanctions hanging over,’ said Crothers.

The contracts will also be structured differently.

Traditionally, long-term deals have break clauses so that underperforming suppliers can be ejected when it is proved they have breached the terms and conditions, but under the planned ID deals, contractors will have to fulfil success criteria to qualify for the next phase of the contract.

‘We will predefine success criteria in each phase and only when they are met will the supplier move into the next part,’ said Crothers.

The IPS strategy shows clear development from the experiences of the £12bn NHS National Programme.

The need for supplier co-operation and step-by-step performance assessment are all lessons learned from the health service, said Ovum government practice director Eric Woods.

‘The main difference is the incremental rollout which should make it easier to assess performance,’ he said.

The first of the implementation deals will be those to replace and extend the existing immigration and asylum fingerprint system and passport application and enrolment.

In the meantime, IPS is working with DWP to ensure that the citizen information system is sufficient.

The procurement structure has largely met with approval from the IT industry, which has been frustrated by delays.

But the piecemeal approach comes with dangers of its own, according to some major firms with public sector experience.

‘The IPS is going for a new collaboration model, rather than the traditional closed bidding approach ­ the danger is, who will own the integration risk?’ said a source at one global player.

The industry is quick to point out that the government has had serious problems with large-scale IT implementations in the past.

‘Letting out the work in packages means the government will have to do its own integration and it does not have a good track record,’ said another senior supplier source.

‘There will be a bit here and a bit there, and the actual joining up will fall on the government.’