ID cards and biometric passports
The government’s national ID cards legislation is before parliament and is expected to become law early next year.

The plan is for a card scheme that uses multiple biometrics – a face, two eyes, 10 fingers – and for the information to be held along with personal details on a national identity register.

The Home Office is in discussion with IT suppliers as part of a pre-procurement ‘concept viability’ study, although the formal procurement cannot start until
the bill is passed.

The government’s original focus on fighting terrorism, fraud and identity theft has been broadened to include benefits for holders, such as swifter access to
government services and simplified authentication for banking and online transactions.

The first cards are due to be introduced in 2007/8, and cost estimates for the scheme range from £3bn to £19bn.

Alongside the ID card programme, the UK Passport Service is continuing trials of biometric technology for inclusion in passports by 2008.

eBorders
eBorders is the £400m plan to tighten UK border security by linking relevant government agencies, travel industry systems and transport hubs, such as seaports and airports.

All travellers in and out of the country will be logged, details will be cross-checked against government databases, and permission to enter the UK will be granted or denied before the passenger leaves foreign soil.

The procurement for the system started last month following the passage of the Immigration Bill through Parliament.

A multimillion-pound deal with IBM for a trial system, called Semaphore, was signed last year.

Semaphore is to record passengers’ details on 10 international routes, including Karachi, Pakistan; Ottawa, Canada; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

eBorders, which is expected to be up and running by 2010, is central to government anti-terrorism plans.

Police
Police IT is to be revolutionised by the £140m Impact programme, developed
in response to the revelation that Soham murderer Ian Huntley got a job in a school despite a string of earlier sexual allegations.

Sir Michael Bichard’s inquiry criticised police forces’ inability to share intelligence effectively and concluded that a UK-wide system for sharing information should be a ‘national priority’.

The first stage of Impact is the National Nominal Index (NNI), which allows a name and date of birth to be checked against the 13 million records held in local custody, intelligence, domestic violence, crime and firearms systems.

Limited NNI trials began in February and the system is expected to be in place across the UK by 2007.

Past attempts to establish standard systems for the UK’s 43 independent local forces have failed because forces could not agree on how they should work.

Impact is the responsibility of the Police IT Organisation (Pito). But
an independent review, published in June, said Pito had failed and should be scrapped.

The creation of a national design authority to develop and enforce the technical standards of Bichard’s recommendations is under discussion.

Criminal Justice IT – CJIT
The £2bn CJIT programme was established to create joined-up justice. The heart of the plan is the virtual case file, allowing the seven independent agencies of the criminal justice system to share case details electronically and securely.

This year has seen many key developments. Multimillion-pound deals for the application and hosting of the main component – the ‘Exchange’ secure hub – were signed with Steria and Fujitsu, respectively, in September.

The Courts Service Xhibit system, an online portal of hearing information for relevant parties such as police, witnesses and prisons, is running in 56 of 101 crown courts, and will be completely rolled out by March.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s Compass case management system recently went through the final stage of the government’s project monitoring process, and is held up as an example of a successful implementation.

The National Offender Management Service (Noms), created by merging the prison and probation services, has also kicked off two major new system implementations.

Once fully live in 2008, the £39m Noms system will provide a single view of offenders from court to custody to probation.

The £250m Offender Management National Infrastructure will upgrade Probation Service systems and integrate with Noms in the new organisation.

Shared services
The Efficiency Review, published by the Treasury in July 2004, says Whitehall departments and agencies must strip more than £21bn a year out of running costs by 2007/8. Achieving these savings is crucial for the government if investment in
public services is to be sustained without raising taxes.

There are 1,300 different public sector organisations, all with their own administrative systems.

A key element of the Review is the development of shared services. This involves different departments and agencies using the same administrative systems, such as human resources (HR) or finance, to cut back on duplication.

The model could cut 20 per cent from public sector administration costs.

The initiative will be led by the eGovernment Unit at the Cabinet Office under the newly appointed director of shared services David Myers.

Appropriately, the Cabinet Office is an early adopter. A tender was issued in July looking for suppliers for a shared HR system for the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

National Programme for NHS IT
This year has been bumpy for the £6bn, 10-year National Programme for NHS IT(NPfIT), the largest civil IT programme that the UK public sector has ever embarked upon.

At its heart is the development of a national data spine, supporting an electronic patient records system, to replace paper notes.

The programme also includes electronic bookings, a high-speed broadband infrastructure, upgrade of hospital systems, and extra services such as electronic X-ray capture and archiving.

The contracts were signed in 2003 and the first systems were due for delivery this year. But the number of ebookings is woefully short of predictions, deployment of the next-generation patient administration system is more than six months behind, and a key system supplier has been axed.

Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, says the cornerstones are in place and installations will pick up in the coming year.

Jobcentre Plus – JC+
Government plans to streamline the benefits application process are backfiring and some new claimants are waiting months for payments to start.

Regional call centres and a national customer management system (CMS2), to replace the old system of paper forms picked up from a local JC+ office, have created confusion and massive delays.

Backlogs of calls have left new claimants unable to get through to call centres and reversion to the old clerical system has shifted the problem further down the line, creating bottlenecks of unprocessed claims at local offices.

In September, all but two of the 23 call centres across the country using CMS2 were graded unacceptable.

The Department for Work and Pensions says it is putting processes in place to solve the problems, but sources in both JC+ and Citizens Advice Bureaux say no progress has been made.

Local government
According to the Cabinet Office, the 2005 egovernment target – for all public
services to be available online by the end of this financial year – has largely been met and 96 per cent of services will be online by the end of March 2006.

With the expiry of the 2005 target, local authorities are shifting their focus to the savings required by the Efficiency Review.

Analysts predict a growth in large-scale business process outsourcing and
long-term ‘partnership’ deals with IT suppliers. A number of such contracts have been signed this year, including Harrow Council’s £45m deal with Capita and Rochdale’s £188m contract with Agilisys. Tenders from Birmingham and Southampton councils are also under way.

An important theme for the coming year will be consideration of alternative models of shared services, such as sharing between local authorities and sharing on a geographical basis between councils and other public sector organisations, such as police forces and social services.

Defence Information Infrastructure – DII
The Ministry of Defence signed one of the UK public sector’s largest single IT deals in March this year.

The £4bn, 10-year programme to develop a consolidated infrastructure across all three armed forces was won by the EDS-led Atlas consortium.

Ultimately, DII will cover permanent sites as well as battlefields, ships and submarines.

Work is under way on the first stage, which focuses on the maritime element and is due to deliver in early 2007.

The DII deal was a significant win for beleaguered US supplier EDS, following a string of setbacks in the previous two years.The company failed to win any of the NHS
deals in 2003, worth £6bn, and lost out to Capgemini in the tender for the Inland Revenue’s £3bn Aspire contract in 2004. EDS also faced problems over the tax credits system and its involvement with the Child Support Agency.

Fire Service
The saga of Firelink, the fire service’s national radio system, has dragged on for much longer than expected.

The plan for a national digital system was first mooted more than six years ago but has suffered continual delays.

The network was planned to have been in place this year but the two shortlisted suppliers – EADS and O2 Airwave – are still waiting to hear who has won the deal from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Firelink was originally expected to be signed in July 2004. But the date has since shifted, to November, then March this year and then May. The decision is now
expected this month.

Under the current timetable, the service will be rolled out to brigades by 2008,
but that may slide further because of the procurement delays.

The network will be established alongside the controversial FiReControl plan to rationalise local control rooms into nine regional centres.