Yes, I’ve met this in practice while evaluating tenders on behalf of an absent colleague: Companies had bid against a poorly written, woolly specification. (The specification’s author had tried to be too clever and place the onus on the bidders but had failed to make our requirement clear.)

The resulting bids were all for different things, none suitable. The favourite US supplier had quoted double the expected price. (They later revealed that they had viewed our requirement as too vague and too risky so had loaded the price.)

Only after rewriting the specification, reassuring and renegotiating with the suppliers did we finally procure the installations at close to the expected price. This cost us much time, effort and credibility.

For those unfamiliar with Kable, it is the UK’s leading research specialist into public-sector IT spend. It has supplied government and industry with public-sector IT spend data since 1991.

As part of its work to inform IT suppliers about future government IT business, Kable modelled the costs of the identity system proposals. This was done in the absence of any detailed official information about costs, and because of a lack of clarity about just how government sees the project incurring costs. Such work is based largely on assumptions.

Kable contacted the Home Office ID team several times to try to discuss its costing assumptions for the identity system, and to understand better how the Home Office saw the scheme working. The Home Office reply through its press office is shown below.

The Home Office says “a summary of Kable’s work has been reviewed by the Identity Cards programme”. Kable’s model is straightforward and was published it in its entirety (at http://www.kablenet.com) when the LSE report was published. The assumptions are set out very clearly. Being a working model, it produces different results if the assumptions are changed (as the LSE team did, for reasons which appear to Kable entirely valid). Kable did not produce a summary.

“I’m puzzled as to why the Home Office reviews Kable’s work and comments on it, but doesn’t discuss it with us as we asked them to,” says Kable chairman William Heath.

The Home Office response says has it has put a great deal of effort into costing its own proposals. Also, the Home Secretary told the BBC “I accept the obligation on me … to set out the figures in the clearest and most substantive way.” Yet there is no public evidence of that effort, and the Home Secretary has yet to do this.

“The Home Office criticises the LSE’s cost information as vague,” says William Heath. “But what Kable has done with its costings is a model of openness and clarity by comparison to the Home Office’s approach to costings information. If suppliers form the view the Home Office is being wooly, evasive or deceptive about this plan, they will see an increased commercial risk and they will raise their charges accordingly. The way to keep costs down in such a project is to be clear, open and specific about what is proposed and how it will work”

ends

1. In industry, if a project’s sponsor presented me with a document like this, I would cancel the project. So many of the Home Office’s answers seem to miss the point or apparently try to confuse the issue. Some even try to “blind with science.”

2. Few paper passports need replacement during their 10 year validity, but I expect that more “chipped” passports will: Creased photos still work, but cracked or cooked “chips” do not. In the days of “proper” passports, if our appearance changed we were encouraged to supply a new photo and have it stuck in.

3. Interesting information that CESG expects the security scheme to last 10 years. Presumably this means that the security scheme will then be considered unsafe and ALL card will have to be recalled and replaced!

4. The IEE is the Institution of Electrical Engineers, not the Institute. Does this error reflect the Home Office’s approach to accuracy?

5. Will the card contain any useful information or will it just be an electronic token which aids online enquiries? If the card contains useful information, presumably it will sometimes need replacement when vital information changes?

6. I thought the ID card scheme met the DPA simply because the ID card bill says that it is exempt!

7. If the Home Office really has generated highly detailed costings, please could they publish them?

8. I qualify as a referee for passport applications. Just how many fraudulent passport application really rely on fraudulent referees and how many rely on “insiders”?

9. Precisely how is a poorly paid public employee (probably an agency worker engaged by a PFI/PPP) more trustworthy and harder to coerce than a traditional bank employee?

This is a silly analogy. For one thing, supermarket safes get robbed… see this from 10th February 2005 in the UK…

“Around 4:15pm the [supermarket] manager was approached by an unknown male and threatened.  An item was pressed into the manager’s back and he was instructed to go an open the safe.  The robber made off with a sum of cash (believed to be several thousand pounds).”

It makes obvious sense for the robbers to attack the safe, not the tills, because that’s where ALL the money is. The Home Office have not the slightest possibility of keeping the data on the Register secure. While the LSE’s proposed alternative scheme doesn’t look like much of a runner either, it’s important to note that overall it’s no worse than the Home Office’s proposed one-stop-identity-theft-shop.