One official warns of a “botched operation” that could put back the introduction of ID cards for a generation. He added: “I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.” Another admits he is planning Home Office strategy around the possibility that the scheme could be “canned completely”.

In one email the prime minister is personally blamed for the fiasco with his proposal for a scaled-down or “early variant” version. “It was a Mr Blair apparently who wanted the ‘early variant’ card. Not my idea,” writes a top Home Office civil servant.

The emails expose another crisis for John Reid, the home secretary, who has already labelled his department as “not fit for purpose” following the recent foreign prisoners scandal.

The correspondence has been leaked by a senior official close to the Treasury. He acknowledges that the documents will infuriate ministers because they contradict the government’s public statements on ID cards.

Bliar has repeatedly trumpeted the scheme as a centrepiece of the government’s efforts to combat terrorism, illegal immigration and crime. Ministers have rounded on critics who say the government has underestimated the cost and complexity of the technology.

Last year ministers rubbished claims by the London School of Economics that the scheme was too unwieldy and would cost as much as £19 billion, compared with the government’s estimate of £6 billion.

The government proposes that all Britain’s 50m adults will eventually carry the cards, which will include biometric data such as digitally encoded fingerprints or iris scans that could be checked against a huge database. The cards are to be introduced voluntarily from 2008 but, if re-elected, Labour proposes to make them compulsory for everyone over 16.

The email correspondence last month was between Peter Smith, acting commercial director at the Identity and Passport Service, the Home Office agency set up to bring in the cards, and David Foord, the ID card project director at the Office of Government Commerce, which is responsible for vetting the project to ensure that the Treasury gets value for taxpayers’ money.

They reveal that the government is “rethinking” the entire scheme with an alternative “face-saving” compromise, which Smith blames on Blair. This “early variant” plan appears to involve collecting and storing biometric data on a temporary ID register but makes no mention of actually using it on cards.

However, officials doubt that this will work. Foord writes: “Just because ministers say do something does not mean we ignore reality — which is what seems to have happened on ID cards until [the contracts were due] to be issued and then reality could not be ignored any longer.”

He adds: “Even if everything went perfectly (which it will not) it is very debatable (given performance of government IT projects) whether whatever [the register] turns out to be (and that is a worry in itself) can be procured, delivered, tested and rolled out in just over two years and whether the resources exist within government and industry to run two overlapping procurements.

“What benchmark in the Home Office do we have that suggests that this is even remotely feasible? I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.”
He reveals that the contracts for the ID card scheme are under threat because of “the amount of rethinking going on about identity management”. He also says they are “[un]affordable”; “lack clear benefits from which to demonstrate a return on investment”; and suffer from a “very serious shortage of appropriately qualified staff”.

Foord says: “I do not have a problem with ministers wanting a face-saving solution but we need to be clear with . . . senior officials, special advisers and ministers just what this implies.” He then warns of a “botched introduction” of the scheme, adding: “If it is subject to a media feeding frenzy, which it might well be close to a general election, [it] could put back the introduction of ID cards for a generation and won’t do much for IPS credibility nor for the government’s election chances.”

Acknowledging these concerns, Smith says his IPS agency is planning around the possibility that the entire protect will fail. In a June 8 e-mail he writes: “We are designing the strategy so that [other contracts such as a contact centre for passport queries] are all sensible and viable contracts in their own right EVEN IF the ID card gets canned completely.”

In public, ministers have so far given no hint of any private fears about the viability of the scheme. But senior officials admit privately that the Home Office has abandoned its timetable for introducing cards.

Foord writes: “This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality. The early variant idea introduces huge risk on many levels.”

The problems in designing a workable system have meant a delay until March 2007 in putting out contracts to tender to private companies to build and manage the scheme. They had been due this summer.

Another official involved in the project said: “Nobody expects this programme to work. It is basically on hold while ministers rethink their options. It’s impossible to imagine the full scheme being brought in before 2026.”

The disclosures will be seized on by critics who say it is too expensive, unworkable and a breach of privacy. The Tories plan to scrap the cards and use the money to build prisons.

Simon Davies, a member of the LSE team that said costs could rise to £19 billion, said the rethink was “a vindication of all the concerns we have expressed about the costs and viability” of the scheme.

Last night the Home Office said it remained committed to an ID card scheme but had always maintained its introduction would be an “incremental” process. The cards are expected to cost about £93, which each citizen must pay when getting a new passport from 2010.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2262437,00.html

Health Direct asks- what do you get when you combine an ambitious IT sche
me run by the Labour government and a plan that threatens to ride roughshod over civil liberties? The answer is an unholy mess. As leaked emails reveal, Tony Bliar’s flagship identity card scheme is struggling and could even collapse in an embarrassing shambles. Two years before ID cards are set to be introduced for people renewing their passports, the chances of meeting that timetable look remote. The entire scheme may yet have to be shelved.

In many quarters this will be a cause for celebration. The 9/11 attacks on America produced some overhasty government thinking. They gave us the lopsided extradition laws that permit British bankers to be flown to the United States this week but cannot be used to bring Americans to Britain. They also prompted the ID scheme.

David Blunkett’s relatively modest proposal for an entitlement card for state benefits and National Health Service treatment has been transmuted into a fully-fledged ID card.

In its election manifesto last year Labour sold the policy as strengthening crime and security and protecting Britain’s borders. “Across the world,” it said, “there is a drive to increase the security of identity documents and we cannot be left behind.” Cards would make British citizens safer, protect them from identity fraud and cut the cost of welfare benefits and the NHS. What could be more sensible?

One big hitch was the enormous cost. When the London School of Economics (LSE) published research showing that the cost of ID cards could be as high as £19 billion — more than three times the government’s estimate — and said the cards could be legally unsafe, ministers went into attack mode. Charles Clarke, the former home secretary who now languishes on the back benches, accused the LSE of being “technically incompetent” and said its figures were “simply mad”. But the LSE’s figures were carefully costed and the record of huge cost overruns and delivery failures in government IT projects, admitted in today’s e-mails, always suggested that official estimates should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Mr Clarke was honest enough to admit last year that ID cards would not have stopped the July 7 bombers. Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, said ID cards would not make us safer, even against the threat from foreign terrorists, and she doubted whether anybody in the intelligence services would be pressing for them. As with all official documents, she suspected that determined forgers would find a way of replicating them.

Should the government accept the verdict of its own experts that a politically driven programme with a “lack of clear benefits” might, and perhaps should, be “canned”? It would be another broken promise from Mr Bliar, but he is used to those, as are voters. Why press on with a scheme that will cost billions with very little discernible benefit?

On this, as on many things, Frank Field, the former welfare reform minister, has sound ideas. It was his committee which first identified the scale of National Insurance fraud in Britain, with at least 20m more NI numbers in use than there are people in the country. He believes that the scale of fraud in the NHS is significant.

Rather than scrapping the whole ID scheme, he argues, it should be launched gradually, first to foreigners coming to Britain to stay and then to young people getting their NI numbers for the first time. A programme like this should be within the government’s capabilities and would even allow the prime minister and his colleagues to save face.

If you too want to vent your spleen and protest against Bliar’s costly, incompetent NHS entitlement ID cards, please join the NO 2 ID Cards debaye today.