So, what's cooking on the planet of idiocy? Well, Charles Clarke has now announced that,
It will be affordable to set a charge of £30 at current prices for a stand-alone ID card which is valid for 10 years. This will be affordable within current Home Office spending plans.
-- actually most people will still be conned out of at least £93, which is still the best estimate of the combined cost of an ID card and passport. Of course, the total cost of the scheme (which has apparently already consumed £20 million in consultants, advertising, and Tony McNulty's ``biometric roadshow'') is still projected (by the Home Office) to be £5.8 billion or (by everyone else) much, much more: getting on for £150 per person. So where's the rest of the money coming from? Well, the FT reports that,
The home secretary does not plan to seek extra money from the Treasury. Instead, he hopes to meet any additional costs from within his own budget and from other departments such as health, education and work and pensions that he believes could benefit from the savings the scheme is expected to generate.
But he has yet to secure the agreement of ministers that he can recoup those savings. The Home Office said: ``We are looking at ways that other government departments that might benefit from the ID scheme can contribute to its financing.''
... the scam here being that other departments can be relieved of money that they would otherwise spend on actual public services, the proceeds being diverted to spending on a white elephant to go with the Home Office's safety elephant.
Now, this capping of the cost may be enough to convince Labour MPs that voting for the scheme tomorrow will not do catastrophic injury to their careers. But it does change the debate a bit. Previously the government have claimed that ID cards and the National Identity Register will be financed out of new spending, so that the 10,000 police officers, numerous hospitals or whatever that the money could pay for were completely hypothetical; now the plan is to take that money away from actual public services which are actually being delivered now.
Comments
Posted by dsquared, Monday, 17 October 2005 21:41 (link):
Charlie is surely about to be introduced to some realities if this is his plan, by the way; it is a fundamental principle of government accounting that budgets are simply not fungible between Departments in this way. He can make savings from his own department's budget to subsidise ID cards (though if he takes too much out of the police budget the cost will just show up again on local government council tax bills). But if the House of Commons has voted £xbn for the Department of Health or some such, then it is not possible to just write a cheque and transfer the cash over to the Home Office. There are a fair few civil servants who are in the habit of cutting up unbelievably rough about this sort of thing (not least, because doing little behind-the-scenes deals like this would, if it became general practice massively undermine the power of the Treasury).
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 00:07 (link):
Well, I think the intended scam here is that some department (say, health) will be so enthused at the prospects of efficiency gains obtained by tying their IT systems into the National Identity Register that they'll pay the Home Office to obtain this service, in the same way, presumably, that many departments are so enthused by the competence and efficiency of, say, Capita, that they hand over large cash sums to them for their existing IT. So they're thinking of payments for services rather than simple subsidies, though how the prices for those services will be set I don't know.
As I've said, I don't find this argument very persuasive. Say I'm running a government department and I already have a giant database of all my `customers' (as I understand they are now called). Now I have the options of (a) spending a lot of money integrating this database with the NIR; or (b) spending the money on something actually useful (like treating patients or hiring police officers). Why would I opt for (a)? Well, if I think that the actual benefits of integration with the NIR outweigh the costs, that might look wise, but nobody yet seems to have come up with a convincing case where they are. The typical things that are mentioned in this context are preventing `health tourism', preventing benefit fraud by crooks employing multiple identities, and saving money on the process of new customers proving their entitlement. There aren't any very accurate estimates for those, so far as I know, but they don't seem to be very large costs.
And even once you have integrated a department's database with the NIR, it'd be unwise to assume that the cost of maintaining that database will fall much if at all. After all, it's still got to contain all the domain-specific information that it started off with (we're not going to be storing our medical or tax records in the NIR, thank god); integration with the NIR might help in the case where customers change their status (address, etc.), but it's really not obvious that that's a significant cost in maintaining the database.
Posted by Senji, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 15:53 (link):
If, say, the Department of Health had lots of money to spend on computers then they'd've done so and would be saving money hand-over-fist. I doubt they're likely to puff up lots of money for this scheme either...
Posted by marek, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 01:12 (link):
Actually it is entirely possible to write a cheque (though it would actually be a bookkeeping entry), and it happens all the time. If in this example, DH formed a view that the health of the nation were to be more efficiently served by purchasing database/authentication/identity management services from the Home Office, it would be within the 'ambit of the vote' - ie would legitimately be funded from the money voted by Parliament for the health service.
That still leaves the question of whether DH (or any other department) would want to spend its money this way - but there's no inherent obstacle in government accounting rules to stop them.
Posted by Alex, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 11:31 (link):
And, of course, if Clarkey's supposed "concessions" aren't actually lies, the cards won't be linked to medical, criminal or social security records...so why would the NHS want to pay to use them?
Posted by dsquared, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 18:14 (link):
But if his claim is that other departments would sign up to the ID card database as part of the normal procurement process that this is hardly unproblematic either; surely there would have to be some sort of market test to show that the services being acquired in this manner could only be provided by Charlie or could be provided with best value for money. If Charlie is about to claim that the Home Office is about to become the best provider of database services in the world (or I suppose, in the EU but it more or less amounts to the same) then he's going to have to pass a few fairly stringent laugh tests.
Posted by marek, Thursday, 20 October 2005 20:18 (link):
There are two separate questions here which may have got a bit tangled up:
1. Can, say, DH transfer funds to HO? Yes, easily: DH need to be able to demonstrate that the expenditure is consistent with the purposes for which the money was voted by Parliament, but that isn't (in this context) a stringent hurdle and I can't see any difficulty in their passing it.
2. If DH buys a service from HO, does it have to go through an open procurement process? No, probably not. I can't claim any expertise on the law - it may have something to do with the indivisibility of the Crown, which comes in handy sometimes, but the practice is that departments can and do reimburse each other for services exchanged between them (though the underlying service itself may have been subject to competitive procurement, as will presumably be the case with the day to day operation of the identity register).
Posted by Dan Hardie, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 13:24 (link):
Is it not fairly obvious that Clarke is trying every means he can to sabotage this plan, short of actually saying in public 'ID cards are bollocks and I resign'? (If he did resign his likely replacement would be John Reid, which is why caution may well be the better part of valour.) First he recommends that bio-metric ID cards be introduced at a Europe-wide level, which as any fule know will require unanimity among member states and will almost certainly be blocked by (at least) some of the Scandinavians, and perhaps also the Dutch and the Poles. Some of these states have electorates which are at least as Euro-sceptical as the Brits are, and there is no way in hell that the ex-communist states can afford biometric ID cards.
Now he's saying that multi-billion pound projects do actually have opportunity costs, which will rather sour the public, and other Cabinet ministers, on the plan. Blunkett's big recurring line when he was Home Sec was 'John Reid is supporting this because he knows it will prevent health tourism.' Clark, in effect, is replying 'if we have to do this for the NHS's sake, let's get our hands on some NHS funding, then. By the way, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis of using biometric ID to prevent health tourism?' And it's probably going to turn out that the costs of health tourism are un-measured but not as large as the costs of introducing biometric ID.
Clarke made it pretty obvious which side he was on when he popped up 24 hours after the July bombing saying that ID cards wouldn't have prevented the attacks. If Blunkett had been Home Secretary at the time, what do you think he would have said? I'm betting he would have told 'Islington liberals' or whatever that they had the blood of fifty innocents on their hands. No wonder there have been all sorts of mutterings in the papers about 10 Downing Street being 'unhappy' with Clarke. It's a little unedifying to read sensible people having a pop at Clarke when this is a policy whose onlie begetter is someone called Blair.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 21:48 (link):
It's not really clear what he's up to. He wasn't mentioned in discussion of the cabinet argument over the proposals in November 2003 (see, e.g., this BBC piece), and while he was education secretary he floated a plan to make applicants for student loans present ID cards. Of course, neither tells us anything about his personal views; seeing a fight develop between his cabinet colleagues over the proposals, he might well have decided that the best option was to shut up and wait for somebody else to get hurt, whilst the stuff about student loans may have been cooked up by his civil servants without any great input from him (and of course David Blunkett, arch-ID-cards-enthusiast, was his predecessor at Education).
Yeah, I think you're right that the question would have prompted a pro-cards rant from Blunkett, but -- and remember that the bombings occured while the committee scrutinising the Bill was sitting, and so a `yes' answer from Clarke would have had to be defended by Tony McNulty in committee -- I don't think a sensible minister would have used the that question on Today as an opportunity to advertise the scheme: it'd be too much of a hostage to fortune, and also invite accusations of making political capital out of the bombings. (Also... could Clarke have had security services information about the identity/nationality of the bombers by then? I wouldn't have thought so.)
I see your point about having a go at Clarke -- and he is much less offensive than Blunkett -- but I'm not quite convinced that he actively wants rid of the scheme. (Offensiveness of Home Secretaries being inversely proportional to the amount of criticism they receive from the PM....) Obviously it'd be a career-limiting move for him to try to ditch the thing now, but he doesn't seem to have taken any opportunities to delay it either (e.g. after McNulty told the Fabian society that the thing had been ``oversold''). That said... I'd interpreted the EU/biometrics thing as an attempt at policy laundering -- ``if it doesn't get through the Commons, try to get the EU to impose it instead'' -- but equally it could be a way to bog it down.
Posted by Alex, Wednesday, 19 October 2005 13:05 (link):
Bollocks. If he wasn't in favour of it, he'd actually do something about it rather than blasting on with yet more three-line whips.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Wednesday, 19 October 2005 17:48 (link):
Oh, all right, grab the straw from the drowning man's hands... Charlie Clarke is doing an awfully good impersonation of the Good Soldier Schweik- is he screwing everything up on purpose or is he really that inept?
Posted by Pete Stevens, Wednesday, 19 October 2005 11:58 (link):
Just for refernce, having recently done a next-day passport application where you have to present yourself in person it cost £89. A normal (postal) application is £40. I also spent an extra £60 in rail fare to get to the passport office twice to apply and then collect my passport.
£93 for a combined application is either a premium of £53 for the passport, or £4 depending on how you account for it.
Incidently, is there a case where an identity card is acceptable idenfication and a passport isn't? If there isn't, why do I need both?
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