Whitehall & Westminster World Civil Service Network

When Sir Gus O’Donnell started work as cabinet secretary he spent part of his first day on the job at Globe House, the headquarters of the UK Passport Service in Victoria. “It’s easy to presume that all civil servants simply operate out of Whitehall but on my first day, I wanted to get out of the office to see how they are delivering what people need at a community and customer level,” Sir Gus said at the time.

Now, nearly two years on, Globe House is home to what has become the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), and is run by James Hall, a former managing partner of Accenture. As chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, and director general for identity services, Hall finds himself in one of the key positions in the civil service – somewhat ironic, as it transpires that Whitehall’s HR managers rejected the chance to hire him after he graduated from university. “I was tempted to join the civil service but the civil service wasn’t tempted to employ me!” he says, smiling. “I got through the first half of the Civil Service Board, as it then was, but frankly I’m delighted with the way it’s turned out – what goes around comes around.”

Hall joined Accenture in 1976 as an analyst and programmer and worked his way up the organisation. Appointed as the managing partner for Accenture in the UK in 1994, a post he held until 2000, he spent the following five years as managing partner with responsibility for technology and systems integration across the organisation. So what made him move to the public sector? “I figured about 18 months ago that 30 years was an indecent time to spend with any single employer and made the decision to leave last summer,” he replies, adding that a portfolio career was his most likely destination.

“But I’d done a lot of work with the public sector and was always attracted by the opportunity of working there, and as I started to review the opportunities, this opportunity came up. The more I thought about it the more it became clear that I had a choice between doing a number of part-time and intrinsically perhaps rather boring things where you couldn’t really be accountable or make anything happen, or this position – which was clearly not part-time and very interesting and worthwhile. Obviously there is a formal place that you need to go through. At the end of the day it was a competitive selection process but I felt that it was an opportunity I would kick myself if I didn’t go for.”

The IPS was established as an executive agency of the Home Office last April. Hall has overall responsibility for the organisation, operation and management of the service, including the successful introduction of identity cards and the national identity scheme.

The scheme aims to provide a comprehensive and secure way of managing the personal identity data of all those who legally reside or work in the UK by helping secure our borders and tackle illegal immigration, prevent identity fraud and become a key defence in the fight against crime and terrorism. The scheme also aims to improve customer service, as it will make it possible to join up and personalise services across government departments, and the wider public sector.

Under the plans, applying for an identity card will be the same as when applying for a passport. When a person enrols, their biometric information – such as facial image and fingerprints – is recorded. Each person will need to re-enrol once every 10 years, in much the same way as passports are currently renewed every 10 years. The National Identity Register (NIR) is where personal identity details will be recorded and maintained. It will have links with other government systems to share identity data, and will support identity checking services. From 2008 the Border and Immigration Agency will issue biometric identification to foreign nationals and from 2009 the IPS will issue identity cards for British citizens. From 2010 IPS will issue significant volumes of ID cards alongside British passports.

Clearly, then, this is a massive government project and, as Hall admits, it has attracted a high degree of political controversy. Asked what lessons from his time in the private sector that he hopes to apply to his IPS role, Hall says that actually, he has been surprised by the similarities between the two sectors.

“A lot of people from the outside presumed there would be some massive cultural shift between working in the public sector and private sector,” he says. “But I’ve found it much less of a shift than people anticipated. If you’re working with large, complex organisations and dealing with complex problems, you’ve got the same set of issues and the same set of things to deal with. And in many ways I’d say that if you compare life in the public sector to life in a large multi-national, I’d probably get more freedom of action here than there.”

But surely the media spotlight in the public sector must take a little getting used to? “Yes, clearly there are differences. We are subject to a degree of media scrutiny and to some extent media cynicism that people in the private sector don’t have to deal with and don’t, frankly, begin to understand. We’ve certainly had our fair share over the past six months! You can’t take it personally obviously – it comes with the territory – but I suppose it just means that you have to have a high level of personal confidence that you are doing the right thing and that you can defend what you’re doing on television.”

At the end of last year the Home Office’s permanent secretary, Sir David Normington, admitted to Whitehall & Westminster World, that it had been a “tumultuous year” for his department and Hall agrees that it has been through the mill. “The Home Office has had an unbelievably negative, relentless media focus over the past 12 months or so,” he points out. “And there is no organisation in the world – public or private – that could survive that much critical scrutiny completely unscathed. Everybody makes mistakes. Every large organisation makes mistakes. And, frankly, with the great majority of them, people correct the mistake over the due course of time and they move on. Although every single thing is subject to this absurd level of critique, it hasn’t become debilitating and I think the Home Office has survived it very well. We’re moving through it, dealing with it and getting back on to the front foot.”

In terms of his role at IPS, Hall says that he is working towards a set of key benchmarks. “As a management team we set ourselves not even annual targets but we look four to five months ahead about what we need to accomplish and achieve,” he says. “I think it’s very easy – particularly under the media scrutiny we’re under – to constantly get distracted and to forget about what we’re really trying to achieve here.”

He goes on to set out his three main targets. “First of all we’ve got an operational service that we deliver today to which we’re making some quite significant enhancements and changes,” he says. “We’ve got to do all of that and keep that show on the road. There is a lot happening in 2007 and in any other circumstance you would regard that as a very big programme. Secondly, we’ve got to deliver the national identity scheme in terms of actually getting to the point where we can issue identity cards and capture the required biometrics by the back end of 2009. There is an awful lot of work ahead to make that happen. And the third thing we’ve got to do is, even in advance of the time we start to issue identity cards, is start to drive the use and adoption of those cards.”

Hall is clearly a passionate advocate of the identity scheme, describing it as an “identity utility”. Not for him the doubts of civil liberty campaigners or opposition politicians. “The value of the scheme is proportionate to how widely it is used,” he says. “Both in terms of how many citizens take up the card but also how many business processes the card is embedded in across the public and the private sector. Identity activities are absolutely everywhere – they’re not limited to the borders or to government agencies – they happen every time you go to the bank or wherever. What we’re seeking to do is make our identity product the standard.”

And he admits that they can’t do it all at once. “What we’re seeking to do is to start to define priority areas where we can start to drive real value to groups of citizens very early on in the process,” he says. “So that when we’re starting to say in 2009 that the cards are available, we can also say that here’s half a dozen useful things where life starts to be a bit simpler, either for the individual or for a business or for a government department, as a consequence of you having that identity product.”

Asked whether he understands why some doubt the government’s ability to effectively deliver this massive project, particularly as its track record is not flawless – one thinks of the Dome, or the problems with the NHS IT programme – Hall argues that no-one’s track record is perfect. “And of course, the law of big projects is that we will have some hiccups and some things will go wrong – this is as inevitable as night follows day,” he adds. “The government’s track record, by the way, is far better than you would ever surmise from reading the newspapers because no-one ever writes about the successes. But if you look at what the DVLA have done over the past few years, or DWP’s success in implementing radical amounts of technology very successfully, or what we did here at IPS with e-Passports, having chips embedded in all passports, there is a track record of success. The other point to make is that of course there is a lot of technology in this but it is only a fairly small proportion of the cost over the next ten years. The much larger proportion of the cost comes from needing to be able to deal with our customers directly and collect their biometrics.”

Hall goes on to say that the Home Office itself is a highly political
department. “The subjects it deals with are, by definition, political,” he says. “Identity cards have become a debating issue between the two main political parties and I think the discussion tends to overwhelm the range of benefits. No-one has ever said the cards are a silver bullet solution to any given problem but they are worthwhile because they help citizens, business and government with common problems around identity assurance. And actually some of the most disadvantaged people in society – those who are at the margins – are the people who need most help from government and have the most difficulty in proving their identity as they don’t always have three utility bills to hand and so on. If we can give them a simple, secure mechanism for controlling identity then I think that would be extremely helpful.”

Hall is such a strong defender of the identity cards scheme, it seems pertinent to ask whether he was signed up to it before taking up the role. He was – but he is more of a fan now. “The more you think about it, the more you realise they can be helpful across such a broad range of situations,” he says. “It starts to become common sense. And if people ask why they need a passport and an identity card, well you don’t need a passport unless you’re travelling outside of the European Union. If you’re in the EU the identity card will be a perfectly legitimate travel token, but for the time being the passport beyond the EU borders is the only internationally accepted travel document.”

Although, as he points out, the identity card is no silver bullet against terrorist activity, Hall nevertheless believes it will be a valuable tool for law enforcement agencies. “From the statistics we’ve been able to glean, 0.15 per cent of our passport applications may well be fraudulent,” he says. “This is a tiny percentage but because we issue well over six million passports a year, it turns out to be quite a large number. These fraudulent passports are almost universally the tip of an iceberg which leads to other forms of organised criminality. Why do people want a fraudulent passport? They want to disguise their identity and they are doing this in the context of immigration fraud, people smuggling, money laundering, terrorism and so on. Frankly, as we have moved the passport itself to be a great deal more difficult to counterfeit, the sophisticated criminal or terrorist isn’t going to get into the business of trying to forge these documents.”

Hall, then, has clearly got a lot on his plate but he is keen to stress that for his organisation, you can’t divide the passport and identity card businesses. “When we have rolled out the identity scheme there will be the same enrolment process and biometrics for both,” he adds. “You can’t really separate them.”

Pictures: Gary Lee/UPPA/Photoshot