MPs pick at ID threads
The Register reports:
A Commons committee has expressed doubts that existing technology can handle the government’s national identity card scheme
Members of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee used a hearing on biometric ID cards, taking place on 22 March 2006, to suggest that Home Office officials do not yet have a clear enough grasp of the technical demands to run a successful procurement exercise.
Chair of the committee Phil Willis MP said some of its members had recently visited the US Department of Homeland Security and been told it believed the technology was not yet mature enough to warrant an ID card procurement. The committee established that the Identity Card Programme had set up a “level one” procurement – which outlines what is required from the scheme – but that it is waiting for responses from the IT industry to draw up a level two specification that would outline how the technology should work.
Willis suggested the programme team does not have a clear idea what it wants and would be easily led by the industry.
Nigel Seed, project director for the National Identity Register, replied: “It’s not that we don’t know what we want, but we’re not sure how to implement it.”
That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about this Identity Cards Scheme, and in particular about the (lack of) published costings.
March 26th, 2006 at 11:54 am
[…] ve scale rather than on a small scale. The government has admitted that they don’t even have a complete technical specifcaiton, so any guarantee that this man offers on that […]