Government admits ID card project won’t be fully tested
David Meyer writes in ZDNet UK:
The government has admitted that it will not rigorously test all aspects of the identity cards scheme before putting it into practice.
The comments were made in the government’s official response last Friday to a report by the House of Commons science and technology committee, entitled “Identity Card Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence”.
The committee had recommended that changes to the programme, based on trial results, should be implemented “even if they impact the delivery timetable”. However, the government responded that “trial results need to be used in a pragmatic way and should not distract from the need to deliver a workable solution in a timely and cost-effective manner”.
“It would not be realistic to rigorously test everything before the scheme ‘goes live’ to the point where the government can be sure that no further changes need to be made to the design of the scheme,” the government insisted, adding that “some parts of the solution will not be tested but will use ‘off-the-shelf ‘ technology that has been adequately tested elsewhere”.
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However, the government demonstrated a different attitude towards the value of “off-the-shelf” technology elsewhere in the same document, when it responded to the committee’s enquiries about the UKPS Biometric enrolment trial in 2004.
That trial demonstrated significant shortcomings in iris-recognition biometric technology — a part of the scheme that has now been shelved for the near future. But the government said on Friday that it did not accept the validity of the results, because the technology was not optimised or set up for the requirements of a national identity card system.
The government quoted a Dr Mansfield of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), who said: “The trial was not devised as a performance trial but it illustrated that if you just buy off-the-shelf systems and deploy them with no adaptation to the ID cards programme the performance would not be terribly good”.
Simon McGee, reporting the publication of the same government document in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post, noted a different set of contradictions:
Home Office Minister Liam Byrne insisted last week that the scheme would cost £5.4bn over 10 years, close to previous official estimates, and that it would be introduced according to plan from 2008.
But his claims were spectacularly contradicted last night in the Government’s official reply to a hard-hitting report published by the Commons Science and Technology Committee addressing flaws in the project.
The MPs found it would be years late and over budget and Ministers were still in a muddle about what the card and accompanying database were intended to do. It concluded that plans were inconsistent, lacking clarity and had so far produced politically motivated optimistic cost estimates.
The committee, chaired by Mr Willis, had demanded that Ministers issue “a clear timetable” for the project.
But in reply the Home Office document pointedly refused to be drawn on dates and said it was important to “remain flexible”.
The response itself can be downloaded here.
