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PRESS RELEASE
Embargoed
until: 0600 hours, Saturday 30 October 2010
The UK Passport Validation Service – whose income is it anyway? 30 October 2010 You
will need no reminding that,
according
to note 5d
on
p.44
of
the annual
report and accounts for the Identity & Passport Service
(IPS),
in
2009-10,
various
organisations paid £467,000
to
use IPS's Passport Validation
Service (PVS).
PVS
allows DWP, HMRC, the Chelsea Building Society and others
to
check that a passport offered as proof of identity
has
not been reported lost or stolen.
Fraud,
it is said, is thereby reduced.
Catechism:
Who provides the passport data? Passport-holders.
Who pays for the passports? Passport-holders.
Who gets the £467,000? Not
passport-holders.
And that's wrong, isn't it.
We
are already paying £77.50
for a 10-year adult passport,
when
the natural price is more like £23.
There
are all sorts of reasons why we are being over-charged,
but
no excuses.
That
will no doubt quickly be corrected by IPS
perhaps with additional moral fibre
provided by the National
Audit Office.
But
there is no reason to stop at £23.
The
price could be driven down further still
by
paying the income from PVS
to
its rightful owners – passport-holders.
Notes to editors:
1. £467,000 p.a. is not a lot of money
in the context of UK passports. If it was given back to passport-holders,
it would reduce the price of a passport by approximately 10p. £23 would
become £22.90. But suppose IPS manage to sell PVS to more users and that
income goes up from £467,000 to £4.67 million or even £46.7 million. Then
the figures become more interesting, £23 becomes £22 or even £13.
2. At whatever level, whether £467,000
or £46.7 million, that PVS income properly belongs to passport-holders
and to no-one else. IPS cannot be allowed to appropriate it. Nor can anyone
else. It is sensible to make that point now, while PVS income is low and
while it is easy for IPS and others to give it up precisely because
there isn't much of it.
3. What are the chances
of IPS being able to increase PVS income by a factor of 100? On past performance,
not high. Last time they tried to insert themselves into the nation's
payment systems, the Crosby Forum
told them in no uncertain terms where they get off. But IPS are under new management now.
4. If IPS can't increase the
income from PVS beyond its present paltry level, then they should save
the taxpayer a bit of money by dropping it.
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