WRITTEN ON April 13th, 2008 BY David Moss AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Government Procurement, Identity, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

According to an August 2007 article in the FT, contracts will be awarded for suppliers to the NIS this Spring. Now. But will any suppliers bid? After all:

• The NIS may turn out to be a smaller system than suppliers expected and there may be less money to make out of it as a result. Crosby has ruled that the high volume of transactions that go through the banks and the big retailers are not on the menu. There is no reason for suppliers to expect the NIS to be involved in DWP benefit claims nor in the health service nor education. Scotland may refuse to use the NIS, and Wales, too. Its advocates always claim that the NIS will be used to prove everyone’s right to work in the UK but IPS failed to provide the ID checking service they promised. And it may be that, far from everyone aged 16 and over, only certain sections of the population will be fingerprinted.

• The timescales are stretching. Far from starting at the end of 2009, as previously planned, the NIS will not start to be rolled out in earnest now until 2012. And given IPS’s track record, suppliers would be well advised to allow for more delays.

• As the economy dips, people will want more assurance that their stealth tax money is being well spent. Hard to provide that assurance, when a number of prospective suppliers have already pulled out of the bidding, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee are just as unimpressed with IPS’s plans as Crosby and the biometrics on which the NIS depends are unreliable.

• There are alternatives to the NIS. Identity assurance could be provided by the banks and/or the mobile phone companies and/or the utility companies and/or the credit referencing agencies. The NIS could become irrelevant. These other systems could be more effective and could come on-stream earlier than IPS’s 15-year timetable – a surprisingly relaxed timetable, given that we’re talking here about the UK’s response to crime and terrorism.

• Suppliers to the NIS would be victims of the lack of trust in the government identified by Crosby – they would be tarred with the same brush.

• IPS is not some unstoppable behemoth with a mandate to monitor everyone in the UK. On the contrary, it is a supplicant, in sales talks with prospective customers, and it hasn’t closed a single deal yet.

• Suppliers will be dependent on IPS and IPS are vulnerable. They are dependent on Labour and Labour treat the NIS like a political football. If the Lib Dems or the Conservatives come to power, the NIS will be cancelled, as its equivalent was in Australia, and suppliers cannot expect to be bailed out.

So now how sensible does it look for a supplier to invest in this project? Which sensible chief executive would commit the funds? Why? What return is sensibly to be expected? What price risk?

(This article is the summary of a longer paper on the subject, ‘A risk assessment for prospective suppliers to the UK NIS’, which first saw the light of day on IdealGovernment.com in November 2007.)