Matthew Parris
A blazing row broke out this week between the Conservative Party and the IT industry. Though it has a critically important bearing on the government policy at issue — Labour’s compulsory identity card scheme — this row is really about our unwritten constitution. It is a dispute in which David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, is absolutely right. The information technology industry knows it. This explains its fury. The Labour Party knows it, too. This explains its silence.
The story has hardly broken in the media, except in the financial press. But an exchange in which a man quite likely to be Home Secretary after the next election calls the trade association representing many of the world’s largest IT suppliers “incredible”, “insulting”, “ill-judged” and “disingenuous” deserves attention.
The correspondence is a joy to read. The website ConservativeHome has published it in full. John Higgins, Director-General of Intellect (an IT umbrella body), must be reeling this weekend — unready for what hit him after he was unwise enough to accuse the Shadow Home Secretary of “point-scoring”. With evident relish Mr Davis has piled in, fists flying. At issue is this: Mr Davis has publicly warned the IT industry that in making arrangements with the present Government for delivering a national ID card scheme, it should know that an incoming Tory government would reverse the policy and unwind the private sector contracts that have flowed from it.
Opposition to the ID card scheme is, of course, official Conservative policy. The party has already said it would not proceed with it. Mr Davis was simply spelling out the consequences. But Intellect reacted with squeals of outrage. “I have read with concern,” wrote Mr Higgins in a letter he was unwise enough to issue as a press release, “your pledge that an incoming Conservative government would cancel the ID card scheme.” On behalf of the entire “community of supplier companies operating in the public sector market” the letter proceeds to insist, first, that “the UK technology industry is neither for nor against the policy of introducing ID cards in the UK”. Parliament, says Higgins, has decided.
Well, yes. But Parliament can undecide. Parliament has decided that citizens may own and drive motor cars, and I suppose the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders could roll its eyes piously and pronounce itself “neither for nor against” this policy, but simply the ’umble servant of those who wish to take the opportunities it offers; but a trade association pretending to be disinterested makes a tempting target. Mr Higgins’s remark invited both barrels. “Simply disingenuous,” Mr Davis retorts.
Mr Higgins compounded the provocation. “It is wholly inappropriate,” he writes, “for the industry to be used as a mechanism for scoring political points.” One imagines the protests that might have come from the Chartered Institute of Harpoon Manufacturers on being told by the Opposition that before investing further in the industry, members of the Institute should know that the Opposition was promising to ban whaling.
Mr Davis went into orbit: “I am afraid that your claim that an honest assertion of our intentions is somehow indicative of a general commercial bad faith is both incredible and insulting,” he writes. He accuses Intellect of a “failure to appreciate” either the nature of the public debate or the depth of opposition to the ID cards scheme.
Mr Higgins tries some sabre-rattling. “Companies selling into the public sector market will quite reasonably seek to protect themselves in case a future government revokes a contract upon coming to power,” he writes. “This may result in suppliers seeking stronger break clauses in discussions with government as they seek to protect themselves. This could consequently result in a less favourable environment for the taxpayer.”
What is he saying? That governments can bind successor governments to its legislative programmes by insinuating into commercial contracts an unwritten understanding that a successor government will not revoke them? Mr Higgins may be right that when a project’s future is politically precarious, contracts must take account of that; but such is the price of democracy. Mr Davis’s scorn is unconcealed: “Your thinly veiled threat of penalty clauses, at taxpayers’ expense, is inappropriate and ill-judged. . . Large IT projects should be segmented into several contractual phases to protect against the risks involved. I attach a copy of the Public Accounts Committee’s 1999 report, Improving the Delivery of Government IT Projects, which you might benefit from reading.”
Winding up his press-released letter, Mr Higgins makes the mistake of patronising Mr Davis. He invites the politician to meet his organisation to learn more about the subject: “Engagement with Intellect’s members will help you understand the progress suppliers have made around the transformational government agenda as well as the issues which remain today.”
A former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Davis cannot resist a final kick: “I was only too familiar with the IT sector’s successes and failures in delivery of public services. You may be sure that we will have learnt from those experiences.”
It is good to see a leading Conservative take a hardheaded approach to inappropriate lobbying by the business sector. Even if I did not share the Tories’ antipathy to the ID card plan I would find Intellect’s suggestion that the Official Opposition abandon a central policy simply because the Government had padlocked its programme to a contract with the private sector worse than inappropriate: it is outrageous. In opposition, Labour had every right to announce, as it did, that it would scrap contracts for the Millennium Dome project, which it would cancel.
Would that Labour had stuck to its guns and done so. Whatever the price of abrogating those Dome contracts, the nation would have been saved a great deal more money by aborting the plan. There is hardly a date before December 31, 1999 when this would not have been preferable to the alternative.
New Labour’s national identity card scheme would be likely to prove — were it ever to happen — another Millennium Dome, this time in plastic. Almost at whatever point, and at whatever cost, a successor government cuts the losses on this plan and scraps it, the move will cost less than carrying on. Name me a state-sponsored white elephant for which, half way through its development, the argument has not been that, even if in retrospect the original decision was wrong, it was now too late to cancel the project, except at disproportionate cost. But in retrospect it seldom was.
Today the Home Office’s ID card plans have a whiff of Eurofighter about them: escalating costs in pursuit of technically difficult and untested technology, for a cause for which the specifications keep changing in a fast-moving situation. It is important for the Tories to get firmly onto the public record, now, that they have set their face against this circus.
That is what Mr Davis has done, and Mr Higgins has helped to make the occasion memorable. Ministers dare not complain, for to do so is to concede that we should not be confident that Labour will win the next election.
I could argue in principle against all compulsory ID card schemes but prefer to rest the case on an argument that even those who support the idea can entertain. ID technology is in a state of flux. The day may come when Britain embraces a compulsory ID card scheme: by the middle of this century maybe all sophisticated countries will have joined the pack. Fine. So let us leave other nations to tip their coffers into getting the technology right, and, once it has settled down, weigh the costs and advantages, and reconsider. For now, let us drop back, and wait.
After the stand David Davis took this week, that is now the likelihood. The IT industry had better get used to the fact.
