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When the obituaries of this government are written, historians will use global economic changes and shifts in political culture to explain its downfall. They would do as well to examine Labour's geekish enthusiasm for new technology.
Actually, that's unfair to geeks, who at least know their computers. The Government is closer to being a conman's mark. IT consultants promise that health, crime and immigration policies can be transformed by slipping the right (if pricey) discs into the right (if pricey) systems. Time after time, hundreds of millions of pounds vanish and public services deteriorate. No matter. Like a slapstick fall guy, New Labour comes back for more.
The latest fiasco over discs from the DVLA takes me back to the late 1990s, when Fleet Street newsrooms were inundated with calls from apparently mad migrants claiming that "the Home Office has broken down". On investigation, they were telling us no more than the truth.
Ministers had believed the computer company Siemens's promises that its system could improve the Immigration Service so markedly that experienced officers could be fired. They duly were, and chaos followed. A backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases built up. Mounds of mouldering paper files left in a Croydon warehouse had to be fumigated by pest-control specialists before they became a health hazard. Their details couldn't be transferred to the marvellous computer system because it never, well, worked.
This week the Home Office said it had finally dealt with 52,000 cases from the backlog. The Tories claimed it was in effect giving those it allowed to stay an amnesty because it couldn't deport people who had been in the country for years. But the real scandal is that we are still dealing with the consequences of the failure of a Utopian technology project almost a decade on.
I wouldn't go on so if the Government had learned its lesson. Instead, it presses ahead with techno-fantasies that can only lead to disaster.
If you think the child benefit and learner driver data losses were bad, just wait until the country's medical records come online, available to every blackmailer with a chequebook.
More alarming still is the identity card register. Long before the confidential information on the nation's parents went walkabout, researchers at the London School of Economics warned that the plan to hold everyone's personal data in a single central repository would be an identity fraudster's dream. "The National Identity Register poses a far larger risk to the safety and security of UK citizens than any of the problems it purports to solve," they concluded.
It won't be the records of poor asylum seekers on the NHS and ID card systems but those of every voter in the country. If I were a Labour MP, I would pray that the computers fail. The electoral consequences of a working technology are too horrible to contemplate.
Reader views (1)
The justification used for things like ID cards is that the police (or other public servants) think it is a good thing. A good test of how valuable they think it is, would be to say "ID cards - we propose to take 25% of the cost of the system from the existing police budget, how many ACPO members are in favour of that?" We all know that some form of ID card system (even if it is rubbish, which it probably will be) would be useful for the police and other organs of the state, but the real value test is if we threaten to reduce the budgets of these "beneficiaries" rather than charging it to the wider public. Watch all those white elephants being trashed by irate public servants. (that said, the NHS IT fiasco is coming from the health service budget, but accountability is so amorphous that no one objects...)
- Ken, Oxford, 20/12/2007 11:21
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