ID cards: Why they were destined to fail

David Blunkett and others explain why the mega-IT project fell out of favour

In 2002 the Labour government revealed proposals to create a national UK ID card to combat identity fraud and international terrorism.

The card was to act as a guarantee of its holder's identity, courtesy of an embedded microchip that would hold biometrics such as the cardholder's fingerprints, photo and iris scans.

Over the next eight years the grand vision for the ID card was slowly reduced in scale, as the project's costs grew and the card's potential uses shrunk, while the scheme continued to become steadily more unpopular with the general public.

The ID cards project is no more, scrapped by the coalition government - but not before the previous Labour administration ploughed about £257m into the now defunct venture.

The ID cards project was in many ways destined to fail. Not long after it was proposed by then Home Secretary David Blunkett in 2002, politicians, academics and silicon.com itself pointed to the lack of clarity about how project's goals would be achieved at a reasonable cost to the public purse and individuals' privacy - two issues that would haunt the project throughout its life.

After several hold ups in the House of Lords the Identity Cards Act was approved by parliament in 2006
(Photo credit: Shutterstock)

The card itself was hamstrung by the decision to turn it into a travel document allowing cardholders to travel within Europe, according to Gus Hosein, visiting fellow in the information systems and innovation group at the London School of Economics (LSE) and co-author of a report into the scheme.

"That became a specific design constraint around which everything started to fall apart afterwards," he said.

"That is because you have to design the card in such a way that it is globally interoperable, not necessarily nationally interoperable. Otherwise you would have had the freedom to create a card with a smart chip to authenticate identity when accessing services provided by the Department for Work and Pensions or other government departments or local government.

"Instead they designed a card whose primary purpose was to be read by foreign governments."

According to Blunkett, the decision to turn it into a travel document had resulted from a desire to restrict the information that was given for the card, in order to quell concerns about the cards' impact on personal privacy, he told silicon.com.

"It had reached the point where people were suspicious of anything related to giving information - it's partly the success of groups like NO2ID and Privacy International.

"They were tossing handgrenades at something that didn't exist: the kind of incursion into privacy wasn't the intention of the ID card and biometric database and wouldn't have been the case.

"We got all tied up with civil rights and privacy when the intention was never to intrude on people's privacy at all," he told silicon.com.

Activist groups weren't the only ones expressing their disquiet with privacy issues surrounding the card, however: certain sectors of the government were also uneasy about the card.

An image of the British ID card
(Image credit: Home Office)

"The card could have been used for a whole range of purposes if people were not so worried about the issues of intrusion," Blunkett said.

"For instance, it seems to me that the ID card and the driving licence could have been incorporated together but the Department for Transport were vehemently opposed to that in 2003/04 and that is why that didn't happen."

This whittling down of the card's potential functionality was a phenomenon that dogged the card throughout its life.

The government also dropped plans to put iris scans on the card's embedded chip and decided not to include EMV technology that would have allowed the card to authorise transactions using chip and PIN.

This cutting back did not go unnoticed by industry, and in 2009 the cards stripped-back feature set was criticised by the UK card payments association, then known as Apacs, when its then head of security said that the card was devoid of useful features, such as the ability to use chip and PIN to authenticate transactions.

As the card's functionality dwindled, the gap between the government's ambitious promises for what the project would deliver and the capabilities of the project being delivered by the IPS continued to grow.

Sold in its early days by the government as a means of fighting terrorism and stamping out ID fraud, by 2009 it was reduced to being touted as a proof of ID when buying booze or getting into nightclubs or as a travel document to journey within Europe - even when the card was only available to those holding a valid passport in the first place.

Hardware too failed to keep pace with the ID cards grand vision: in February last year silicon.com revealed that the UK government had not rolled out a single reader for ID cards' embedded microchip, despite introducing ID cards for foreign nationals at the end of 2008.

Card readers had not even been included in the IPS' 10-year cost projections for the ID cards scheme and Home Office officials admitted that most of ID checks using the cards would be a simple visual comparison between the cardholder and the photo on the card's front, a check that is already possible with driving licences and passports.

Despite cuts to its functionality and delays to hardware rollouts, the scheme was still slated to cost £5bn - a figure which it should be noted also included the cost of providing and issuing biometric passports. The government said that the majority of the project would be financed by the £30 fees paid by the public who took up the card - a vain hope, as it turned out.

Given the lack of uses for the card it is perhaps unsurprising that the take up of the card among the British public was less than overwhelming.

David Blunkett was Home Secretary when an early version of the UK national ID card was proposed in 2002
(Photo credit: Office of David Blunkett)

Since the cards were first made available to certain British nationals in October 2009 - starting with civil servants working in Manchester and London - to the announcement of the scheme's cancellation last month, only about 13,200 cards were issued.

Airport workers and airline crew at Manchester and London City airports were one such group who were chosen to receive the cards ahead of the cards rollout to the general population but who chose to resist the scheme.

A spokesman for the national pilot's union Balpa told silicon.com that it had opposed the scheme because the cards failed to provide what its members wanted.

"The government did not offer us any consultation on what we wanted from ID cards, that was the reason for our opposition," he said.

"At the moment pilots have to carry different cards for every airport [in the UK], what we wanted from the scheme was a single card that allows pilots to access all airports."

As a result of the opposition from the unions the government dropped plans to make the cards compulsory for all airport and airplane staff operating out of Manchester and London City airports, and made the cards available voluntarily instead.

The upshot was that take-up of the cards remained low: "I do not know a single pilot that applied for one - there might have been a handful at most," the Balpa spokesman said.

Attempts to offer the cards in specific regions of the UK - first Manchester, then the North West, young people living in London and then to any British national who had registered an interest in the scheme - generated a similarly lacklustre response.

People living in the Manchester area had chosen not to pay £30 to get an ID card because they could see little reason for doing so, Manchester Withington MP John Leech told silicon.com.

"Some people are fundamentally opposed, but most people don't see any real benefit to having one," he said.

"As soon as the scheme became voluntary it was always going to be a spectacular failure."

Earlier this year at an event Bob Carter, public key infrastructure and encryption expert for the ID cards scheme at the IPS, told silicon.com that the first generation card was "a tactical card that we have put out very quickly" and the Labour government was considering introducing an improved ID card in 2012 which would have come with additional functionality - a card that will now, of course, not see the light of day.

Blunkett maintains that he always made it clear that the majority of uses for the ID card would only become viable once the bulk of the UK population held a card, adding that the Labour government had been careful not to oversell the capabilities of the cards in the early days of the project.

"I have always said [the scheme] would not have delivered until we had near universal take-up - probably in six years' time," he said.

"We did our best from 2002 to 2005 to damp down expectations in every interview.

"I made clear that this was not a panacea. It wasn't going to stop 100 per cent of benefit fraud or misuse of free health service by people from outside the country, it wasn't going to guarantee security against the terrorist threat.

"It was a contribution to [dealing with] each of them, based on the fact that you could have proved your identity beyond doubt."

Given the difficulties with getting the British public to accept ID cards, Blunkett himself now feels it would have been better not to have embarked on the ID card scheme, and to simply have made it compulsory for everyone in the UK to hold a passport which included a chip bearing their digital photo and fingerprint scans.

"Given where we are now it would have been sensible to have simply said we were going to have a universal passport - that everybody in the country would have a passport and second generation biometrics would have been taken as part of that," he said.

"Then future usage could have been added once people were comfortable with that."

In trying to satisfy a mishmash of demands for what the ID card should be, without a clear idea of how to get there, the government ended up spending hundreds of millions of pounds to provide an ID card that nobody wanted.

The resultant muddle of a card ended up satisfying no one, not even the man who dreamt up the ID cards scheme in the first place.