Ian Douglas
Ian Douglas joined the Telegraph in 1999 when the web was young and simple, and is now head of digital production. He writes about technology, science, the internet and beekeeping.
This video, showing hard drives that are said to have contained the ID card database being crushed, is a wonderful sight for anyone who values their freedom.
That the 500 hard discs and 100 back-up tapes being destroyed only contain the details of the 15,000 people who signed up for the voluntary card need not concern us too much. Neither should the huge discrepancy between the fairly small amount of hardware on display and the vast amount of money spent on equipment in setting up the scheme.
There is always far more hardware required to collect data than to store it, so to dwell on the £5 billion budget versus the few thousands of pounds worth of kit here would be churlish.
The Identity Document Bill, which received royal assent just before Christmas last year, is now coming into effect and, together with the Freedom Bill, gives us something of an easier footing in our relationship with the state.
Let’s not pretend, though, that the scrapping of the ID card scheme was entirely a sacrifice of valuable data by a liberty-minded executive. Computer Weekly magazine has obtained the planning documents for the scheme through freedom of information legislation, and have done an excellent job of unravelling what a giant mess the project was.
The original plan, for a brand new database, was quickly abandoned and a new idea, for an over-arching superset of existing records was proposed. The Department of Work and Pensions Customer Information System would form the core of it, and more would be added as necessary.
The feasability of this plan was never properly confirmed, despite the original documents stating that approval was contingent upon it. Martin Bellamy was then co-director of pensions information systems at the DWP and is now Director of Information and Communications at the National Offender Management Service at the Ministry of Justice, having spent some time at the Cabinet Office working on cloud computing strategy.
In a 2007 document called Use of the Customer Information System as a shared, cross-government asset, he said: “There are a number of risks and issues to overcome before we take the work forward. The significance of the work and the level of investment required mean that a commitment now is effectively irreversible.” If the super-database didn’t work, there would be no other options for ID cards.
The cross-governmental version of the DWP’s CIS was rebranded as CISx, and approved in March 2007, having received a feasibility study that raised risks, but not Bellamy’s warning that they should be addressed before work proceeded.
The first block of work come in more than a year late and costing more than twice the budget. Two years of security breaches and difficulties in inter-department turf wars and ownership squabbles followed. The Identity and Passport Service admitted that they were considering dropping CISx in 2009 and, in December of that year, it was scrapped.
By July 2010 Alan Johnson, then Home Secretary, said that the cards would not be compulsory for UK citizens. The coalition came into office with a choice: rebuild the identity register from the ground up or forget about it altogether.
Cameron and Clegg have both been vocal critics of the idea in the past so the decision must have been an easy one and, apart from the vast sums poured down the drain working on a system that was never going to work, we’re all better off as a result.