I still say No to ID cards

We can be pretty certain that later this year there will be a change of government and that the Labour Party will regain power at the General Election. Quite apart from drawing parallels between the electoral outcomes of 1997 and now, we also need to be mindful of Labour’s policy DNA and what might happen in the coming years. What have they got up their sleeve they didn’t have time for in the 1997 – 2010 period?
The idea of ID cards is now fringe in terms of political debate, but occasionally I see data science nerds and the chief architects of ID cards, Tony Blair and David Blunkett, continue to advocate for them. Will this be part of the Labour manifesto? One of the first things the coalition government did was to axe the scheme, something I was incredibly pleased about. Let’s revisit the idea of ID cards and I’ll explain why I feel so strongly against them.

A return to authoritarianism
While many people quite rightly decry the populism of Johnson and Trump and the trampling over constitutional norms that they brought to both side of the Atlantic, Tony Blair brought a particular brand of strong arm authoritarianism that we haven’t seen before or since in the modern era. As a Liberal I found myself supporting the public sector investment and good economic management in the New Labour years but I had a major problem with the civil liberty constraints emerging, such as:

• Blanket CCTV coverage, the highest per person of any democracy
• Use of kettling to pin peaceful protestors for hours
• Introduction of high responsibility, low status ‘Little Hitler’ PSCOs
• Infiltration of peaceful protest groups by plain clothes police
• Badly worded Anti-Terror law used to arrest people for harmless activity in the public realm
• Continued deployment of notorious Police units such as the Territorial Support Group

ID cards were the next cab off the rank in terms of a control freak agenda. Time ran out on the idea, and for good reason, a national ID card scheme was set to cost much much more than all of the above combined.

Expensive and pointless – we can ill afford it
Supporters of ID cards jump through mental gymnastics to explain how having an ID card is really really important in addition to having a driving licence or a passport. If you’re actually keen on an Orwellian police state you could argue that identity cards are an idea that’s been and gone – they’re no longer needed. With so many cameras everywhere, including ones in your phone, and GPS tracking in smart phones, the digital world means you leave a footprint everywhere you go, voicemails, phone calls, emails can be tapped or hacked, the only thing that’s really private these days are your private thoughts.
Those in favour of ID cards also back them no matter the cost. When the idea was first floated in the early 2000s the initial estimate was £4Bn, by 2007 that had gone up to £5.75Bn. This is typical of mega projects, where to justify their existence costs are always underestimated and benefits overstated.
What would be the estimated cost today? Around £10Bn perhaps, but the real cost, because large IT projects always overrun, closer to a £13 – 15Bn range. When the estimate for the ID card scheme went up, even New Labour loyalists started to question the logic, the government had been burnt by the NHS patient records IT fiasco that ballooned out to £12.7Bn (original estimate £6.4Bn). New Labour had put misplaced faith and trust in technology, and didn’t seem to be learning any lessons (it was keeping problems with the Post Office’s Horizon software under wraps at this point, though problems were known about it dating back to 1998).
The problem with IT projects is that despite the fact that technology improves, delivering a new bespoke IT system is incredibly difficult and it never gets any easier. I have friends that code for a living, they tell me that if one semi-colon in thousands of lines of code is out of place, the program will not work. It’s small wonder than many early versions of well-known software are full of bugs. Double checking, triple checking code until it’s impeccably clean is a very time-consuming and difficult task, so getting excellent IT systems in place for something that’s straightforward as issuing a separate photo ID card will cost you. Creating a national ID card scheme will never be cheap or quick. If today’s Labour adopts such a scheme, alarm bells should start ringing – it shows it’s learnt nothing from the worst public policy and spending mistakes from its previous time in government.

The idea of ID cards was put to bed in 2010, will we see a return with the next Labour Government? Keir Starmer is yet to make his position clear

Changing the relationship between the individual and the state
I’ve always noticed that those who advocate for ID cards are exclusively white British males living in Britain who in pretty much every respect are in the cultural mainstream, nothing would mark them out as being part of any social group on the fringe of society. Such people would not feel threatened being approached by a Police Officer or would never have to talk to other arms of the state, such as a housing officer, to avail themselves of certain public services. They have no consideration for ethnic minorities, travellers, sex workers, religious minorities, people with special needs, the LGBTQI community – anyone that has a problematic relationship with the rest of society or with the police specifically.
In 1992 I took a politics exam at university, one of the questions was ‘Are the police institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic?’ An intellectual debating point more than 30 years ago, in the intervening time what’s changed and improved? We’re still looking for a root-and-branch reform of dysfunctional forces like the Met today.
The fact so much time has elapsed and so little has improved suggests it will take a huge amount of resource to improve the police force and weed out the bad apples that would abuse the existence of ID cards. Will the next government have that appetite? Past performance suggests otherwise.
There are long-running debates about the merits or the legality of suspicionless stop and search of pedestrians minding their own business, or the flagging down of cars by that are driving normally by traffic cops. Opponents of suspicionless stop and search describe it as a sledgehammer trying to crack a nut, it creates sufficient ill will to be counterproductive as a law enforcement tool. Issuing a national ID card, then placing the onus on all individuals to present an ID card to the police at all times feels like stop and search on steroids.

March 2023 – Parliament Square – it’s nice to go to a demonstration against Government policy and not be kettled for hours, as was customary during the 1997 – 2010 period

From a philosophical point of view it fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and the state in a free society – that is at present our expectation is that we’re left alone as law abiding citizens by the police and do not have to jump through hoops when we interact with the law.
This particular relationship was of great concern to Orson Welles who spoke often about it, this particular clip encapsulates his thoughts really well:

Towards the end of this clip he talks of a potential ID card, but one issued on your terms, not the state’s and he says, “I see that card fitting into a passport, with a border around it in bright colours, so that it would catch the eye of the Police. The card itself should look like a Union Card, or the card of an Automobile Club and since it’s purpose is to impress and control officialdom, well obviously it should be official looking as possible, with a lot of seals and things like that on it. And it might read something as follows, ‘This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race, all relevant information is to be found in his passport. And except where there is good reason of suspecting him (or her) of some crime, he will refuse to submit to police interrogation on the grounds that any such interrogation is an intolerable nuisance, and life being as short as it is, a waste of time.
Any assault, however petty, against his dignity as a human being, will be rigorously prosecuted by the undersigned – ISPIAO – and that would be the International Association for the Protection of the Individual Against Officialdom.’”
Welles’ statement is a thorough and belligerent response to the notion of increasing powers being given over to the police set in the context of interwar fascism, communism across Europe (he regularly travelled to Britain, Ireland and the continent during that time) and the horrors of World War II.
This led to a brief flowering where the concept of civil liberties and human rights was extremely popular in the post-war period. Anglo-Saxon societies were hypersensitive to the notion of overbearing offices of the state, we’d fought, died or risked our lives to ensure freedom after all.
All Liberals should want a balance in the relationship between the state and the individual whereby the individual is left free to live their life as they see fit so long as they aren’t harming others and breaking laws. As far as I’m concerned that is a life where you don’t carry an ID card around with you every time you leave the house in anticipation of a ‘Where are your papers?’ moment when stopped by the police.

Horizon – a 25-year scandal

In the last week I’m sure many of you will have watched the TV drama, read newspaper reports and heard radio phone-ins about the Post Office Horizon scandal. There’s so much out there I won’t repeat the basic fundamentals in this blog but I do hope to make a few original points which you should find useful. There’s so much misinformation out there, and it’s an issue that will run and run.

1999 – the millennium bugs we missed
The Horizon scandal starts in 1999 when, for reasons best known to itself, the Post Office buys Horizon software, a benefits payments package, after it had been rejected by the Department for Social Security (now DWP). Within months end users – staff in Post Offices – are reporting problems with the software, the Post Office’s senior management is unsympathetic and unmoved at the time. To boil things down in very simple terms, when it comes to IT there are two types of procurement you can make – generic off-the-shelf software and hardware, and bespoke specialist products.
So, for example an IT department making generic purchases around the turn of the millennium buys in new desktop PCs made by a multinational company like Dell or HP, with Microsoft Office bundled in, and no Lotus Notes because staff have told IT they don’t like it. While Horizon wasn’t bespoke, presumably Fujitsu hoped to sell it to many public admin bodies that make payments, it was brand new. This made Post Office staff guinea pigs in 1999. Post Office IT managers should’ve been hypersensitive to this at the time – if they were doing their job properly.
If effective command-and-control procedures were working top to bottom within the Post Office, the bugs in Horizon software should have been clearly identified within months of it coming on stream with a clear line of attribution back to Fujitsu, and if they’d been competent in negotiating a contract, there should have been contingency clauses for dealing with bugs in the software too. Computer Weekly, one of only two publications alongside Private Eye that have covered this scandal adequately observes, “During questioning, former Post Office Horizon programme director David Miller was asked about a National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) executive council meeting over two days in June 1999. That meeting’s report said: ‘There was general discussion on the severe difficulties being experienced by subpostmasters who are already running an automated system. Seven sheets of comments from [North East-based subpostmasters] have been passed to David Miller.’
Tim Moloney (KC at the public enquiry) asked whether Miller thought there was anything he could have done, given the knowledge he had, to have prevented the subpostmasters being blamed for shortfalls. Miller said he ‘bitterly regretted what had happened’, but said he only became aware of the problem during the 2018/19 High Court trial.”
So that’s the best part of 20 years of delay, denial and negligence by IT management within the Post Office finally exposed.

Sub Postmasters went all the way to the High Court to seek justice

New Labour – unquestioning faith in IT projects
The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything. While of course we commend New Labour for investing in public services and trying to modernise them, a dogma and naivety that came with this contributed to the £10Bn NHS IT fiasco, and dogs the party to this very day.
My friends in the IT industry tell me it’s almost impossible to deliver a major IT project involving new code on time, on budget and working flawlessly. If there’s one ; out of place in one line of code, where there will be 10,000s lines of code, the programme won’t work. This is why only a few large companies are known for producing bespoke software and when you ask them for it they will issue forth a large intake of breath, just like a builder, and say, “Ohhh it will cost you.”

New Labour – well intentioned but placed too much faith and trust in IT systems, a lack of critical friends pointing out the potential downsides cost them dear

As far as I’m concerned New Labour ministers are on the hook for this – problems with the system emerged in 1999, prosecutions started in 2000, they presided over the problem for 11 years. Moreover there has been no contrition or self reflection from the Labour movement. Tony Blair still touts ID cards, but nobody in the Labour Party tells him it’s a hideous waste of money going into the trough of the IT industry as well as an authoritarian disgrace.
Due to the lack of lessons learnt by Labour, an IT bungle has contributed to the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council – managers requested a bespoke rewrite of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud system, costing £10s of millions. I’m no expert, but I’d say avoid bespoke products at all costs, especially when you have no money!

Coalition Lib Dems – taking hospital passes
You’ll have noticed the knives have really been out in the right wing press for Ed Davey in the past few days. Ed was Postal Affairs minister for 19 months of this 25-year scandal. Part of the outrage is political points scoring, part of it is down to the fact that a minister for Postal Affairs was a pop-up vehicle, it only existed between 2009 and 2015. I assume the post was created in order to oversee the part-privatisation of the Post Office. There were ministers with the Post Office brief before and after, but you won’t hear much about the post-2015 ministers Anna Soubry, Margot James, Andrew Griffiths, Kelly Tolhurst, Paul Scully and Jane Hunt despite the fact that they achieved diddly squat in resolving the Horizon scandal, because they had different job titles.
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the Postal Affairs post was created under Gordon Brown, the first ever minister with the brief being Baron Anthony Young. This is because Labour ended the Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly on postal deliveries and teed up the Post Office for privatisation. Only a back bench Labour MP revolt stopped it happening under Gordon Brown’s watch.
What of the flak coming Ed’s way? Well it’s a combination of the vile and the servile, one of Thatcher’s cheerleaders in the form of Kelvin MacKenzie, and Andrew Pierce, who is an investigative journalist in the same way that Ian Botham is classically-trained actor because he did panto. I’m confident people looking to vote against the government this year will see the smears against Ed, and today against Keir Starmer, because apparently when you’re DPP everything’s your fault, for what they are.
While I don’t believe that Ed, and his successors Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson, did anything wrong in their time as Postal Affairs minister they also didn’t contribute much to solving the Horizon scandal and you have to ask why they agreed to take on such a role when privatisation of the Post Office was not popular with the general public and post office workers.

Toby Jones as tireless Post Office campaigner Alan Bates

Trial by TV
What are the next steps for those still blighted by the Horizon scandal? In the UK we’re not really used to class action suits in the same way America is. Some have suggested there should be an Act of Parliament to give blanket exoneration to the victims. If that’s the best way then so be it. There’s a few other points to mull over – at present being a whistleblower for corporate wrongdoing in the UK is a totally thankless task. There are, no doubt, other examples of malpractice that have not seen the light of day because whistleblowers are not protected and often have their careers ended by going public with bombshell facts about their organisation. That’s got to change. This could be part of a wider root-and-branch reform of corporate affairs going hand-in-hand with abolishing or reforming Ofgem, Ofcom and Ofwat.
Also, what are we to make of the standard of mainstream media journalism in the UK when two relatively specialist titles – Private Eye and Computer Weekly – were the only ones willing to report on the Horizon scandal to any degree of detail over a prolonged period of time? The fact that it’s taken an ITV drama to propel this issue into the national conversation properly is an indictment on national print media brands, especially the titles that are not sympathetic to the Conservatives – Guardian, Mirror, Independent, Financial Times – what were you playing at?
There’s another obscure, but important point to make here, evidence points to the National Federation of Sub Postmasters effectively being captured by the Post Office, In 2015 NFSP General Secretary George Thomson hung his members out to dry spectacularly, he told a select committee hearing, “Over the 15 years, the Horizon system has been fantastically robust. Horizon a very strong system from day one. Sub-postmasters sometimes think that the problem has to be the Horizon system when in effect it was mistakes by members of staff or misappropriation. With regard to the Post Office and Horizon, it has done nothing wrong.” Far be it for me to start a witch hunt but if there’s a villain of the piece that needs to be cross examined again soon, look no further than Thomson. Sub Postmasters deserve better, they deserve their reputation, and their money back.

What you need to know about School Buildings

School buildings are in crisis – we know this because they’re on the front page of several newspapers today. All of a sudden the state of public buildings is part of the national conversation – this is pretty odd in the context of a multi-billion £ repairs backlog for every type of publicly owned building that’s been known about for years. Known about, but not much talked about. School Buildings are making headlines today because over 100 schools might not be able to open next week due to safety fears. The fears are profound and there is also the suspicion of a cover up as we’re not being given specific details about which schools are affected and the extent of the problem in each school.
I used to edit the Building Schools Journal, it was launched in 2005, prompted by New Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme. It seems like a lifetime away now but I’ve followed the sector for many years and I’ll try my best to impart some useful knowledge about school buildings in an easily digested read.

It’s not just about the buildings
Perhaps I’m incredibly biased but the area of school buildings is hugely important, not least because schools need to be safe and attractive learning environments, but for the last 20 years several school building programmes have been aligned to new types of school. We’ve seen City Academies, University Technical Colleges, Studio Schools, and Free Schools – attempts to create new school cultures, new command and control structures, introduce new skills and specialist subjects and pioneer new school designs. Again there’s been remarkably little public debate about these new schools, the City Academy programme has been subject to huge mission creep – a drift that’s never been challenged by any party. The original rationale for Free Schools – convert old buildings never used for education and let a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs instead of the council run them was quite frankly nuts. Is it a good idea for an RAF squadron to be run by a hairdresser, a trumpet player and a binman? No of course not. You wouldn’t let the Armed Forces be run by anyone from the outside but we’ve allowed that for schools instead of leaving it to the professionals as happens across the rest of the public sector.
It’s still early days but if the RAAC in school crisis prompts a period of self-examination and a reset of schools policy that will involve not just an overhaul of school buildings policy but also an overhaul of the types of school that exist in the system, that would be a very positive development.

School buildings policy is chaos
The construction industry is very cyclical, it follows the fortunes of the wider economy but its peaks and troughs are amplified. This also applies to school buildings, at any given time the funding tap has three settings: feast, famine or diet. Since 1945 the Labour Party has generally committed to building schools and the Conservatives have tried to get away with doing the bare minimum. To give you some perspective of the contrast – the Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) aspired to build 400 new secondary schools a year, and in 2010 the capital budget peaked at over £10Bn, in 1996 John Major’s government built 25 new secondary schools and the capital budget was £700m. Yes that John Major, now well respected elder statesman who’s been rehabilitated for being a Europhile. An expert accountant who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing – a granular knowledge of figures who decided to keep the funding tap firmly shut despite a growing economy. He knew exactly what he was doing.
I cite John Major because many readers will be aware that in 2010 the building schools budget was subject to a savage 62% funding cut. This took it back to £4Bn, still far far greater than at any time during the Thatcher and Major years. The RAAC crisis is blowing up in our faces today but it’s been several decades in the making and the Uber-austerity of the 1980s and 1990s, now forgotten, play a part in the magnitude of the problem today.

Hellerup School in Denmark – a widely cited exemplar of good school design – open plan with wide staircases minimises aggressive behaviour

What we’ve been doing for the last 20 years
So much for ‘Pass the peas Norma’ man, New Labour’s domestic policy involved compensating for several decades of neglect in the public building sector with several programmes. This started with hospitals but Blair, Brown and David Miliband turned their attention to schools as the hospital building programme started to wind down (sensible not to deliver big programmes sequentially). Building Schools for the Future was launched, a plan to transform EVERY secondary school in England – 50% would be rebuilt outright, 35% would be refurbished substantially and 15% would be remodelled (a light touch refurb). BSF was hugely ambitious and naive – it was a 20-year programme, In 2006 I asked a senior figure at the DCSF what would happen to the programme if there was a recession, he said that the programme would slow down for a few years and it might take 25 instead of 20 years. If only!
The strengths of BSF were many – it injected much needed investment into a building sector that had seen crumbs since the election of Thatcher and applied a body of research about learning environments to the latest school designs. Other countries that invest in education and children’s services constantly had been a guinea pig for the UK. The really wide staircases and open plan layout of Hellerup School in Denmark exist for a reason. I used to work with Professor Stephen Heppell on the Building Schools Conference and Exhibition – Stephen is a remarkably energetic and upbeat figure. He’d tell people working in the sector they were doing great things, then he’d hit us up sharp with a stat – 45% of all school stabbings happen in stairwells. You can’t design out violence and bullying in schools altogether but you can minimise it if you know how – no pinch points, no dog legs, no blocked sight lines. The best academics were dealing with evidence surrounding the practicalities of child behaviour and visions of how you update teaching methods. The BSF-era schools won’t be problem-free but they did apply research to make them safer and a more pleasant place to spend a school day.
By the time BSF was cancelled by Michael Gove it had been running for six years and had gained momentum – 800 of the 4,500 schools had been selected for work. The building schools budget had expanded by a factor of 13 – the ramping up of activity was controversial within the construction industry as such a volume of new schools meant contractors and architect firms with no track record in education won major contracts ahead of well-established practitioners. A Brave New World, but how meritocratic was it?

Professor Stephen Heppell – an expert in learning environments who was willing to engage with all of the key stakeholders during Britain’s school buildings splurge in the 2000s

The global financial crash had a huge effect on government finances, none more so on capital budgets that were slashed across the board. BSF was cancelled and replaced with something a lot more modest – the Priority Schools Building Programme (PSBP). To give you a feel for the cheap and cheerful nature of PSPB, pre-BSF the average budget for a new secondary school was around £25m, that increased to £30 – 35 million, PSPB brought the figure down to £18m. While BSF had a vision attached to it – educational transformation involving a lot of IT use, there was no ambition with PSBP – money was allocated purely on the basis of dilapidation and demand. Any agenda for updating teaching methods or the curriculum in line with the 21st century was ditched. While the coalition-era PSBP was a major, but inevitable climbdown on what happened before, what we’ve seen since is a further ratcheting down of school buildings in the pecking order.
In 2020 PSBP was replaced by the next school buildings programme – the Schools Rebuilding Programme. The Schools Rebuilding Programme (SRP) was announced by Boris Johnson to no fanfare in the summer of 2020, and has gained virtually no press coverage ever since. If we make allowances for Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine – Russia war dominating the news cycle it’s still striking that this programme has prompted such little debate and scrutiny. The proposition of SRP is simple, build 500 schools over 10 years, due to inflation the cost of building a school has gone back up to £25m so the budget is around £1.2Bn a year. While this is an advance on the dreadful record of Thatcher and Major it represents a cut compared to the PSPB. Depressing as it is to announce, building 50 new schools a year barely keeps pace with rates of building decay – it would take 90 years to regenerate England’s school estate with those numbers.

Thames Park School in Grays, Essex. Built by Bowmer and Kirkland, designed by Stride Treglown. It’s one of the first schools to be constructed using modular methods. Well-established contractors and architects have been making the best of limited budgets since 2010

Never waste a good crisis
How much did people in the construction industry know about RAAC? It was generally accepted that the best Victorian-era school buildings were better than the worst post-war buildings, because of building materials spec changes over time. What we now know about RAAC and why is it such a problem? RAAC is a particular type of concrete that doesn’t contain an aggregate, it has air bubbles instead, therefore is it much lighter than normal concrete. Due to its porous nature it is prone to water infiltration and has a shorter lifespan than standard concrete. Identifying RAAC can be a problem as sometimes it is painted over or coated. Material experts say RAAC can be managed via regular inspections and maintenance. In practice RAAC has become a huge problem because it is often installed in inaccessible locations where monitoring is difficult and let’s face it maintenance in public buildings rarely conforms to good practice guidelines (hello council owned tower blocks!). We have an initial estimate that 150 schools are affected. I’m sure hospitals, town halls, leisure centres, prisons, fire stations, police stations and army barracks will be affected too. The Government says it will spend whatever it takes to deal with the RAAC-affected schools. Beyond that remedial action, what should be next for the schools estate? Watch politicians of all parties closely – is there a genuine resolve to improve school buildings across the board, are they in it for the long haul – or are they restricted to short-term confected outrage? Opposition politicians should at the bare minimum be offering building schemes way above the School Rebuilding Programme which essentially keeps the sector on life support, little more. As an initial proposal I would say we need to be rebuilding a minimum of 80 secondary schools a year and trying to rachet down budgets (which will involve short cuts in materials spec) is a false economy. In 2005 I called the Conservative Press Office during the General Election campaign and asked them if they had a response to the BSF programme – they had nothing to say. That silence was ominous – no one can afford to stay silent now.