I must admit I feel a bit sorry for Meg Hillier MP.
Imagine the professional satisfaction when after just two years in parliament you get the call to be told you are to be made a Home Office minister, an integral cog in one of the great departments of state. Those years of toeing the party line - voting for Trident, for stronger anti-terror laws, against investigating Iraq - would feel like they were worth it after all. Then they hand out your brief and they’ve only gone and given you ID cards.
Of course, I doubt Ms Hillier allowed herself even a moment of self pity. As an ambitious young minister who repeatedly voted for ID cards she has surely already rationalised the appointment as a great opportunity to deliver a successful project that will revolutionise ID management in this country and provide a cornerstone for the knowledge economy.
However, it is hard to imagine this optimism was not dented as soon as she looked at the ministerial in-tray. The tendering process is yet to start thanks to over 18 months of delays, and, according to insiders, there are still a fair few issues to be resolved. Meanwhile, a Freedom of Information request from IT Week’s sister magazine Computing revealed that the government is currently spending almost £50,000 a day on consultants for the project.
On top of all this, IT suppliers, wary of government contracts following all the bad publicity surrounding the NHS IT project, are growing fractious, with one industry source telling me there is a reluctance to believe the project will even go ahead until firms see the tender documents in their hands.
All this would be annoying enough if it was just taxpayers’ money being wasted, but a huge number of businesses are also being disrupted by the lack of clarity surrounding the project.
The key point about ID cards, which the government never properly articulated but tech-savvy businesses understood, is that a secure, universal form of identity will contribute hugely to the development of online services and the evolution of the knowledge economy. There may be valid concerns about civil liberties, but businesses know that a successful scheme would help streamline currently laborious identity management processes, reduce the risk of fraud and enable a huge range of new online services.
Some businesses, such as banks, have tried to usher in these services themselves with investments in their own ID systems, while other firms have waited for the government to explain how they could exploit the national ID card scheme. Meanwhile, no businesses can make identity management investment decisions with any certainty that they are not wasting money on a system that may prove incompatible with the national ID infrastructure.
What businesses need from Hillier, and fast, is clarity. They need to know what information will be held on the cards, under what circumstances they are allowed to check people’s identities, how much each verification check will cost, how compatible their systems will be with the government’s back office infrastructure and whether they will be able to integrate systems at all, how reliable the database will be, how many people will carry cards, when they will be introduced, and, of course, whether or not Gordon Brown is going to have a change of heart a la super casinos and scrap the whole project.
Unfortunately, it is still unclear if the government even knows the answers to many of these questions. Like I say, I feel a bit sorry for the new minister.
