Analysis: Anatomy of an ID card
Jacqui Smith unveils the new ID card last year
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Monday, 22, Jun 2009 12:01
Today's politics.co.uk exclusive on ID cards gives an early indication of the true cost of this scheme if it goes ahead. But it is also a lesson in how to get information from the Home Office when they don't want to give it to you.
By Ian Dunt
We first made a freedom of information request to the Home Office in mid-March, but didn’t receive a reply until earlier this month. We asked two questions. Firstly, how much money had been spent on the Critical Workers Identity Card (CWIC) scheme? And secondly, how many people were involved in the scheme?
The CWIC scheme is the first stage of the ID card roll-out. The government is selecting certain industries to test the project on, and they are then subsumed in the CWIC programme. The first industry is air-side workers, although the programme only affects those in Manchester and London City airports at present. The Home Office told us it had now spent £20 million on the scheme over five years.
We didn’t get an answer to our second question. There's a rule with freedom of information requests, which is that you need to make the question as watertight as possible. We asked how many workers were included in the CWIC scheme. We should have asked how many workers were included in the scheme so far. Because other industries will eventually be incorporated into the scheme, the Home Office was able to tell us that it was impossible to give a number because the scheme was not yet finished.
So we were forced to resort to the Home Office's annual report for 2009/10, in which it said 7,000 "British nationals" would be given a card this year. We then divided £20 million by 7,000 people and reached the figure of £2,857 per card.
There are several problems with what we have done. Firstly, the start-up costs of any project vastly outweigh the amount required run it. This is doubly true with a scheme as huge as ID cards, where all sorts of new machinery, databases, readers and biometric recording devices have to be purchased. It would therefore be pushing our luck for us to say that each ID card will end up costing £2,857.
On the other hand, we have been generous in our calculations. The 7,000 "British nationals" figure is based on two sets of people: CWIC workers and volunteers to the scheme from the government's Manchester roll-out, which is due in the autumn. Later this year the residents of Manchester will be able to apply for the cards, and the Home Office has fitted the estimated uptake into its 7,000 figure.
We spoke with the Home Office and asked them to tell us how many of the 7,000 people would be from CWIC, and how many from the Manchester roll-out. They refused to tell us. We also asked how they could form an estimate of how many people would apply for a card in Manchester, given that there are no precedents for a scheme such as this one. Again, they refused to tell us. We could have assumed the voluntary roll-out numbers, made our calculations accordingly, and arrived at a higher level of spending per card, but instead decided to play it safe and assume the entire 7,000 were CWIC workers.
We also played it safe on the fact that the £20 million figure applies over five years. Given that it takes into account the costs required to "design, build, test and operate the technology" we can safely assume this five-year period relates to the past five year and not the next five years. We made a special point, however, of also calculating the costs per card as if it referred to the next five years. If so, they would come out at £571 each. This figure is reached by multiplying the 7,000 people by the five years, which would mean 35,000 people would be given a card. We then divided the £20 million figure by 35,000.
We mean for the £2,857 number to be taken in context. While it is of course possible that costs will go down once the scheme is up and running, many privacy groups, such as No2ID - who were invaluable during the course of the investigation - actually suggest costs could spiral as the typical process of bureaucratic overspend and badly-handled private sector contracts grows. Already the breaker clauses in contracts with the firms set to deliver the project are threatening to cost the taxpayer millions, leading shadow home secretary Chris Grayling to write to five of the firms, warning them that the Tories will cancel this project if they enter government.
Secondly, the government has an appalling track record in large-scale IT projects, as former shadow home secretary David Davies told politics.co.uk in today's article. Take the NHS IT project, which was hyped by Tony Blair to drag the health service computer system into the modern day. It is years late, and an NAO report puts its cost at £12.4 billion. As Davies said: "Every single government IT project of anything approaching this size has overrun by several hundred per cent and generally failed to deliver".
Thirdly, Jacqui Smith said ID cards would only cost users £30 pounds each. Today's calculations indicate that even if the costs come down substantially this figure is absurd. The price will have to be significantly raised – to the point where Britons would be facing a severe extra taxation during an economic downturn. The alternative, of course, is for the government to subsidise the cards. But the spending required to do this is barely conceivable. Even if we put the individual card costs at half of our most conservative estimate - £286 – that still adds up to £256 of government subsidy per person. If we assume everyone over 16 years of age in Britain is intended to receive a card (that's 48,780,000 people according to the Office of National Statistics) it puts the cost at £12,487,680,000.
You'd have to have a pretty good reason to spend that kind of money when the public purse is hurting as badly as it is. The question is: do they?