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Identity Cards Bill

I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for your advice and tolerance up to this point. However, the point I wish to make about procurement is now directly related to the cost of the overall scheme and therefore the cost that the public are likely to have to bear, be it for a free-standing card or for a passport-plus in the form that 80 per cent. or so of the population will have. There seems to be a lack of willingness in the Home Office at the moment to adopt what is generally called an open process to procurement. That does not involve openness about whether we are advertising according to the normal European procurement processes and so on. There are essentially two approaches to procurement that will have a big effect on the design and cost of the scheme. The first is one where, having defined the broad outcomes and objectives of the scheme, the Government tender for one or more suppliers to provide a black box—computer software or a certain type of card—that will deliver what they want. The second approach is one where all the major issues about the design of the software, the structure of the identity register, the choice of card and the choice of different types of chip on the card are made publicly available and there is the widest technical and scientific scrutiny. Traditional Government procurement has taken the view that the savings in cost achieved by the black-box type of procurement outweigh the advantages of a wider scrutiny of the proposals. Having looked at procurement around the world, the Select Committee came to the opposite view: the most open technical procurement, with the best scrutiny, was most likely to deliver systems that worked at the lowest possible cost.