30 September 2012, a big day – Dame Helen Ghosh and ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken

30 September 2012. It's a big day today. Dame Helen Ghosh's last day as permanent secretary at the Home Office. What will change when she's gone?

• Will Sarah Rapson, chief executive at the Identity & Passport Service (IPS), be allowed to carry on over-charging us Brits for passports to the tune of £300 million a year?
• IPS has never recovered from its failure under Sir David Normington and James Hall to implement government-issue ID cards. They suffered something like a corporate nervous breakdown. Isn't it time now at last for a new name and a re-launch?
• Will Jackie Keane be able to carry on spending money like water on IABS, the Immigration and Asylum Biometric System?
• Will assistant commissioner Mark Rowley at the National Policing Improvement Agency stop wasting money on mobile fingerprint equipment?
• Will Rob Whiteman, chief executive of the UK Border Agency (UKBA), be able to maintain the high standards and success rates of that organisation?
• Will Brian Moore's successor as chief executive of the UK Border Force ditto?
• Isn't it time now to stop hosing money at CSC and VF Worldwide Holdings for their biometrics-based visa application work abroad?
• Will IBM be allowed to stop bashing its head against the brick wall that is eBorders?
• Is Alex Lahood (the Director of Identity Management, no less, at UKBA, please see p.9) still testing biometrics in Croydon? If so, why?
• Is Marek Rejman-Greene still Senior Biometrics Advisor at the Home Office Scientific Development Branch? Ditto.

These are just some of the questions for Dame Helen's successor to ponder.

Today is also the last day for the Government Digital Service (GDS) to announce the approved suppliers of the UK's much-touted Identity Assurance Service (IAS). It really is a big day.

• Will GDS meet the deadline? (Six hours to go ...)
• Will they dare appoint Google and Facebook as "identity providers" to the UK?
• If not, will the NSTIC folk in the US cross them off the Christmas card list?
• Will Martha Lane Fox ditto?
• When Universal Credit fails, will DWP get the blame or GDS?
• Will the Department for Business Innovation and Skills stop pretending to want midata?
• If ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken (executive director of government digital services and senior responsible officer owner for the identity assurance programme) can't make Estonia come to the UK, will he go there?
• Will GDS's dream of inserting GOV.UK into our national payment systems come true? If so, how many weeks before we are reduced to a barter economy? Two? Or one?
• Will GOV.UK replace the Government Gateway?
• Will GDS's IAS succeed where James Hall's ID cards failed?
• Can GOV.UK operate successfully on a cloud service operated by Skyscape, the one-man company?

These are just some of the questions that probably won't be answered tomorrow.

30 September 2012, a big day – Dame Helen Ghosh and ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken

30 September 2012. It's a big day today. Dame Helen Ghosh's last day as permanent secretary at the Home Office. What will change when she's gone?

The other Golden Jubilee – 60 years of Whitehall's disgraceful public administration, "administrative lawlessness"

In The English Constitution (1867) Walter Bagehot famously wrote:

No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or of others which, being the growth of many centuries, exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division) first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population — the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts — those by which it, in fact, works and rules.

We have all just had a pleasant four days here in the UK to reflect on and to observe the success of the dignified parts.

The Constitution doesn't come with guarantees but, since 1936 when Edward VIII mercifully got rid of himself, we seem to have enjoyed dignified parts of the Constitution which live up to their name.

Now the four days are over and it's back to the efficient parts, which don't.

In his book The Socialist Case Douglas Jay wrote:

Housewives as a whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things, where nutrition and health are concerned. This is really no more than an extension of the principle according to which the housewife herself would not trust a child of four to select the week's purchases. For in the case of nutrition and health just as in education, the gentlemen of Whitehall really do know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.

That was in 1937, 75 years ago, and things have changed since then – no civilised man today believes that women are inferior and no four year-old can still subscribe to Lord Jay’s Doctrine of the Infallibility of Whitehall.

In 1952 Professor GW Keeton published his book The Passing of Parliament. Keeton was Dean of the Faculty of Laws at University College, London. He debunks The Socialist Case and points to the danger of the Executive moving beyond the reach of either Parliament or the Common Law:

... Very far from the Common Law replacing administrative tribunals, more and more are being created outside the Common Law year by year, and some of the cases discussed earlier in this book will show how, in spite of obvious willingness, the courts have failed to hold back the onward rush of administrative lawlessness.

That was 60 years ago. Keeton’s question then was, in summary, what was the point of going through all the suffering of the Civil War and of establishing the supremacy of Parliament in the 1689 Bill of Rights if we end up with an Executive behaving for all the world like some latter-day monarch whimsically exercising his or her prerogatives?

In those same 60 years, while the dignified parts of the Constitution have given the definitive lesson in public service, too often Whitehall has continued arrogantly to ignore the interests of the public it is meant to serve while it makes one defective decision after another, inefficient and accountable to no-one.

We have just celebrated two Golden Jubilees. One of them is Whitehall's 60 years of "administrative lawlessness".

The other Golden Jubilee – 60 years of Whitehall's disgraceful public administration, "administrative lawlessness"

In The English Constitution (1867) Walter Bagehot famously wrote:

No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or of others which, being the growth of many centuries, exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division) first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population — the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts — those by which it, in fact, works and rules.

We have all just had a pleasant four days here in the UK to reflect on and to observe the success of the dignified parts.

The Constitution doesn't come with guarantees but, since 1936 when Edward VIII mercifully got rid of himself, we seem to have enjoyed dignified parts of the Constitution which live up to their name.

Now the four days are over and it's back to the efficient parts, which don't.

Protecting civilisation from the fingers of terror

Here's a quotation from an article in New Scientist magazine. You need to know that Visionics is a biometrics company that specialises in face recognition. Now you're an expert:

Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

Admitted ... the police admitted ...

Clearly, the Newham police, for all sorts of human reasons, somehow entrapped themselves in a deception perpetrated on the public at public expense. Has it happened again?

Last week, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley was singing the praises of the mobile fingerprint readers now issued to policemen patrolling in 28 of the UK's 56 police forces. Home Office figures suggest that the flat print fingerprint technology used in these devices fails about 20% of the time.

Equally clearly, and to the credit of the Newham police, they finally extricated themselves from this fraud with their admission. Will that happen again?

How long before we read in New Scientist that:

... Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley admitted to __________ that the MobileID initiative had never even matched the fingerprints of a person on the street to a set of dabs in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest. In fact all it had achieved was to reduce the chances of a felon being taken down to the nick by a straight 20% at a stroke.

For anyone interested in the history of biometrics companies, i.e. how we got into this mess, please note that:

• After the Newham debacle Visionics was taken over by Identix.
• Identix supplied the biometrics technology for the UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial from which the 20% failure rate for flat print fingerprinting is taken.
• Identix was taken over by L-1 Identity Solutions.
• L-1 was bought by Safran.
• And Safran provide the biometrics we depend on for the success of IABS, the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System which is meant to keep the UK border secure and to make the 2012 Olympics safe.

Please note also that the New Scientist article quoted above appeared in the 7 September 2002 issue of the magazine, nearly 10 years ago. The article is so full of important observations of mendacity, opportunism and technological incompetence still relevant today that it is further quoted with grateful acknowledgement below:

Face-off I CAME here looking for an argument but I can't find one. All round this lofty exhibition hall - billed as the world's biggest market for security equipment - the people selling face-recognition systems are being disarmingly, infuriatingly honest ... I thought they'd at least attempt to defend the technology. When they don't, it's me who's caught off guard. Is it true that the systems can't recognise someone wearing sunglasses? Yes, they say. Is it true that if you turn your head and look to one side of the camera, it can't pick you out? Again, yes. What about if you simply don't keep your head still? They nod. Maybe nine or ten months ago they would have risen to the bait. In those days the face-recognition industry was on a high. In the wake of 11 September, Visionics, a leading manufacturer, issued a fact sheet explaining how its technology could enhance airport security. They called it "Protecting civilization from the faces of terror". The company's share price skyrocketed, as did the stocks of other face-recognition companies, and airports across the globe began installing the software and running trials. As the results start to come in, however, the gloss is wearing off. No matter what you might have heard about face-recognition software, Big Brother it ain't ... Image Metrics, a British company that develops image-recognition software, ... warned of the danger of exaggerated claims, saying that "an ineffective or poorly applied security technology is as dangerous as a poorly tested or inappropriately prescribed drug" ... to catch 90 per cent of suspects at an airport, face-recognition software would have to raise a huge number of false alarms. One in three people would end up being dragged out of the line - and that's assuming everyone looks straight at the camera and makes no effort to disguise themselves ... Palm Beach International Airport in Florida released the initial results of a trial using a Visionics face-recognition system. The airport authorities loaded the system with photographs of 250 people, 15 of whom were airport employees. The idea was that the system would recognise these employees every time they passed in front of a camera. But, the airport authorities admitted, the system only recognised the volunteers 47 per cent of the time while raising two or three false alarms per hour ... To give themselves the best chance of picking up suspects, operators can set the software so that it doesn't have to make an exact match before it raises the alarm. But there's a price to pay: the more potential suspects you pick up, the more false alarms you get. You have to get the balance just right. Visionics - now called Identix after merging with a fingerprint-scanning company in June - is quick to blame its system's lacklustre performance on operators getting these settings wrong ... Numerous studies have shown that people are surprisingly bad at matching photos to real faces. A 1997 experiment to investigate the value of photo IDs on credit cards concluded that cashiers were unable to tell whether or not photographs matched the faces of the people holding them. The test, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (vol 11, p 211), found that around 66 per cent of cashiers wrongly rejected a transaction and more than 50 per cent accepted a transaction they should have turned down. The report concluded that people's ability to match faces to photographs was so poor that introducing photo IDs on credit cards could actually increase fraud. The way people change as they age could also be a problem. A study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology investigated what happens when a face-recognition system tries to match up two sets of mugshots taken 18 months apart. It failed dismally, with a success rate of only 57 per cent. There's another fundamental problem with using face-recognition software to spot terrorists: good pictures of suspects are hard to come by ... Very few security personnel at American airports have CIA clearance, so they aren't allowed to see the images. "Until they've got cleared personnel in each of those airports they can't stop terrorists getting on planes," says Iain Drummond, chief executive of Imagis technologies, a biometrics company based in Vancouver, Canada ... Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

There are more of these gems available in the DMossEsq treasure trove of mendacity, Biometrics: guilty until proven innocent.

Look at the Image Metrics quotation above, "an ineffective or poorly applied security technology is as dangerous as a poorly tested or inappropriately prescribed drug". Prescription drugs are subject to extensive testing before the regulators will sanction their release to the public. Without that, we'd all be dead. The same goes for aircraft design. Without the Civil Aviation Authority, a lot more of us would be dead.

There is none of that open, public, peer-reviewed testing regime when it comes to the government wasting our money on biometrics. Try to find out what justification there is for Whitehall's decision to invest in biometrics and you get a two-year court case and no information.

There is no good reason for this peculiar asymmetry.

How do we avoid the recurrence of Newham-style embarrassments?

It's about time the Office for National Statistics was involved in Whitehall technology decisions and that initiatives which depend on reliable technology should not be allowed to incur substantial public expenditure before and unless the ONS has agreed and published official statistics supporting the business case.

Protecting civilisation from the fingers of terror

Here's a quotation from an article in New Scientist magazine. You need to know that Visionics is a biometrics company that specialises in face recognition. Now you're an expert:

Airport security isn't the only use for face-recognition software: it has been put through its paces in other settings, too. One example is "face in the crowd" on-street surveillance, made notorious by a trial in the London Borough of Newham. Since 1998, some of the borough's CCTV cameras have been feeding images to a face-recognition system supplied by Visionics, and Newham has been cited by the company as a success and a vision of the future of policing. But in June this year, the police admitted to The Guardian newspaper that the Newham system had never even matched the face of a person on the street to a photo in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest.

Admitted ... the police admitted ...

Clearly, the Newham police, for all sorts of human reasons, somehow entrapped themselves in a deception perpetrated on the public at public expense. Has it happened again?

Last week, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley was singing the praises of the mobile fingerprint readers now issued to policemen patrolling in 28 of the UK's 56 police forces. Home Office figures suggest that the flat print fingerprint technology used in these devices fails about 20% of the time.

Equally clearly, and to the credit of the Newham police, they finally extricated themselves from this fraud with their admission. Will that happen again?

How long before we read in New Scientist that:

... Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley admitted to __________ that the MobileID initiative had never even matched the fingerprints of a person on the street to a set of dabs in its database of known offenders, let alone led to an arrest. In fact all it had achieved was to reduce the chances of a felon being taken down to the nick by a straight 20% at a stroke.

UKBA – what do the Board do for £1 million p.a.?

They're a busy lot on the Home Affairs Committee. On 11 April 2012, they published their 21st report since September 2010, Work of the UK Border Agency (August - December 2011).

No advance on their 17th report back in January, Inquiry into the provision of UK Border Controls, the Committee draw attention to the UK Border Agency's contemptuous lack of co-operation with parliament (para.79-81). Parliament is meant to be supreme. The Executive, in the form of UKBA, continues to behave as though it is supreme.

As with the 17th report, the Committee make the obvious point that the UK Border Agency is not an agency of the Home office at all, it is an integral part of the Home Office. The word "Agency" appears accordingly in inverted commas throughout the report.

The failings of UKBA do not stop at the Board of UKBA, they go to the top of the Home Office, to Dame Helen Ghosh, the permanent secretary. And they did not start with her, they go back to the incumbency of her predecessor, Sir David Normington.

The Committee expect not only the chief executive of UKBA to co-operate with them but also the permanent secretary (para.12, 37, 73). UKBA's failings are her failings as much as Rob Whiteman's.

And what are those failings?

The Committee list them under 23 headings in this report.

They start by listing the salaries of eight executive members of the UKBA Board, roughly £1 million per annum. £1 million should buy any organisation a lot of management and direction. Especially when, as in this case, it doesn't stop there, there is further input from the top levels of the Home Office.

In the event, with failings in 23 areas reported here, and more being signalled for upcoming Committee enquiries, the expected management and direction are not being delivered.

John Vine, the Independent Chief Inspector of UKBA, made the point in his report on the Brodie Clark affair that (p.6):

There is nothing I have discovered which could not have been identified and addressed by senior managers exercising proper oversight.

The question arises, if they're not exercising proper oversight, what are Dame Helen and Rob Whiteman and the other senior civil servants doing?

UKBA – what do the Board do for £1 million p.a.?

They're a busy lot on the Home Affairs Committee. On 11 April 2012, they published their 21st report since September 2010, Work of the UK Border Agency (August - December 2011).

No advance on their 17th report back in January, Inquiry into the provision of UK Border Controls, the Committee draw attention to the UK Border Agency's contemptuous lack of co-operation with parliament (para.79-81). Parliament is meant to be supreme. The Executive, in the form of UKBA, continues to behave as though it is supreme.

Whitehall on trials

Appendix
Home Secretary, somewhat late in the day, herewith the appendix promised in my open letter to you dated 8 November 2011.

The fourth enquiry – into the efficacy of the biometrics used by UKBA and the Home Office generally – has at its disposal a lot of evidence in the form of correspondence with the Home Office, the UK Border Agency, the Identity & Passport Service, the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, the Information Commissioner and the Information Rights Tribunal available here, here, here and here. The enquiry may also be assisted by reading the reports on biometrics here, here and here.

The hypothesis that the enquiry needs to test is that:

For 10 years the Home Office have been investing public money unwisely in projects which depend for their success on mass consumer biometrics technology being reliable – it isn't.

There is a lot of respectable evidence suggesting that the technology chosen by the Home Office is not reliable and no respectable evidence suggesting that it is. The enquiry may conclude that for 10 years public money has been wasted.

In the matter of Brodie Clark, the implication is that the Home Office's chosen biometrics cannot enhance border security. It is therefore inept to fire the man for not using it.

The further implication is that you, Home Secretary, have been lured by your officials into talking nonsense about strengthening and relaxing border controls – to the extent that those controls depend on biometrics, the technology available cannot enhance border security and can only weaken it by diverting UKBA staff into useless procedures.

There is so much evidence available that the enquiry may welcome some guidance on the best routes to take as they travel through it. It is suggested that the first route they take should be as shown in the timeline below. It's hard to stay awake as you read through it but there is a dénouement to look forward to, so please persevere.

Facial recognition biometrics and smart gates at UK airports
August 2008	Back in August 2008, the UK Border Agency started a trial of so-called "smart gates" at Manchester Airport. UKBA issued a press release about the trial here. Don't bother clicking on the link, the press release has been deleted. With smart gates, travellers walk into one end of a booth, stick their ePassport (electronic passport) in a reader and stand in front of a camera. Face recognition software compares the face on camera with the "template" stored on a chip in the ePassport. If the two images match, according to the computerised threshold tests, then the exit gate opens and that's the traveller done, successfully through passport control. No UKBA passport control staff needed. They can be laid off. There will be considerable cost savings and – the matching process having been performed by computers – it will be more reliable than mere human beings, the security of the border will have been enhanced. That was the idea. In the event, there was some adverse coverage of the equipment in the Daily Telegraph and on the BBC News website: 19 August 2008 – Machines to scan faces of travellers at UK airports 19 August 2008 – Passengers test new face scanners 4 October 2008 – Security fear over airport face scanners 5 April 2009 – Airport face scanners 'cannot tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and Winona Ryder' But that was just unionised UKBA staff moaning about losing their jobs. Wasn't it?
So far so simple. UKBA, playing it by the book, have got this new equipment that takes advantage of the facilities offered by ePassports. Does the equipment work? They don't know in advance. So they conduct a trial. Depending on the result of the trial, either the idea can be dropped, because the equipment doesn't work, or it works well and UKBA can start to deploy these smart gates at airports elsewhere.
24 February 2009	Six months after the start of the Manchester Airport trial, UKBA announced a 10-point delivery plan, which comprised 10 "pledges". Pledge no.7 was, by August 2009, to "have completed delivery of new facial recognition technology in 10 terminals, giving British passengers a faster, secure route through the border". (UKBA's 10-point delivery plan used to be available here, on the bia.homeoffice.gov.uk domain. Don't bother clicking. The domain has long since disappeared. There is what looks like an accurate copy available here down at the bottom of the page.)
Presumably the Manchester Airport trial must have been a success. Presumably the equipment was found to work, presumably it was established that it was a wise investment of public money to deploy smart gates equipment at 10 airport terminals around the country, and presumably it was accurate to assure the public that their experience of automated passport control would be "faster" and "secure".
16 April 2009	Always worth checking these things. Someone wrote to Sir David Normington, permanent secretary at the Home Office, reminding him of the uninterrupted history of failure of biometrics based on facial recognition, asserting that the public would be sceptical about smart gates, and saying: I suggest that the way to overcome that scepticism is to place the matter in the hands of the Office of National Statistics. The use of mass consumer biometrics in public services, I suggest, should be based on official statistics. If rigorous academic evaluation suggests that mass consumer biometrics have a part to play, well and good. If not, then don't let's waste our time and money on them. There was no answer from Sir David.
26 June 2009	But a couple of months later, an answer came through from Brodie Clark, Head of the Border Force at UKBA. "Your letter has been passed to me to respond", said Mr Clark, and: UKBA commenced testing our Automated Clearance System (ACS) at Manchester and Stansted in August and December last year, to assess the accuracy and reliability of the technology. The Home Secretary’s pledge to introduce gates at a total of 10 UK airport terminals by August, includes the two current sites at Manchester and Stansted. It will provide a further opportunity to test the technology on larger numbers of passengers, across a broader range of locations. It also means that the gates will be available to British and EEA citizens throughout the busy summer holiday period. Asked to confirm that smart gates would be "faster" and "secure", was Mr Clark, on behalf of Sir David, going to try to get away with saying only that they were "available"? Asked to confirm that the Manchester Airport trial had been a success, was he going to say simply that the technology would benefit from further testing? No. Mr Clark adds: The test’s findings demonstrated considerable improvement in this field [facial recognition], and confirmed that the technology could be applied successfully in a one-to-one (verification) mode* and We recognise that the vast majority of the travelling public are legitimate, law-abiding passengers and believe that the gates will deliver an improved service† to our customers whilst allowing us to deploy our staff intelligently to areas of greater risk. ---------- * Some of us harbour the suspicion that Mr Clark had to be leant on to write that. † As we now know, the only way to deliver an improved service is to abandon use of the smart gates.
3 February 2010	The history of biometrics based on facial recognition really is a history of failure. If UKBA now had reliable facial recognition equipment, then some sort of a technology revolution must have taken place. Someone, in a letter dated 4 August 2009, asked Brodie Clark to publish the revolutionary Manchester Airport trial results. The same request was made of his boss, Lin Homer, chief executive of UKBA, in a letter dated 8 August 2009. The trial results were not published then and still haven't been published. There is still no respectable evidence in the public domain that UKBA's facial recognition technology works. On 3 February 2010, Lin Homer wrote: UKBA is currently trialling the use of automated gates using facial recognition technology at 10 sites across the UK ... The technology used has proved reliable within the operational environment ... and Evaluation of Manchester gave us enough confidence to proceed to expand the trial.
23 February 2010	Lin Homer kindly arranged a meeting, which took place at the Home Office on 23 February 2010. The meeting was attended by someone and by Karen Kyle (UK Border Agency), Marek Rejman-Greene (Home Office Scientific Development Branch), Alex Lahood (UK Border Agency), Henry Bloomfield (Identity & Passport Service), and Mike Franklin (UK Border Agency). No useful information about the reliability of UKBA's facial recognition technology was imparted at the meeting. In his informal minutes of the meeting, Alex Lahood wrote: Marek Rejman-Greene explained that we are under no illusion that the systems are 100% accurate but that there is adequate evidence/information about the level of performance to warrant embarking on a trial. A year after the 10 "pledges" of the UKBA delivery plan assured the public that the technology works, Lin Homer and Alex Lahood are still talking about trials. Why?
It is normal to publish the results of trials. It is suspicious when trial results are not published. The efficacy of biometrics has been asserted ever since 9/11, over 10 years ago. Public money has been spent throughout that period and continues to be spent on projects which depend for their success on biometrics being reliable. Not once have the Home Office supplied any trial results proving that they are investing public money wisely. For all we the public know, our money is being wasted on technology that doesn't work. If it doesn't work, using that technology cannot improve the security of the UK border. In which case the Home Secretary and the Shadow Home Secretary are talking nonsense when they say that failing to do biometric checks impairs the security of the border. And it is nonsensical to pillory Brodie Clark and force him out of UKBA for not using technology that doesn't work.
5-7 May 2010	By this stage we have had it confirmed to us by UKBA press releases, newspaper articles, letters from Brodie Clark and Lin Homer and the informal minutes produced by Alex Lahood that UKBA conducted trials of facial recognition technology at Manchester Airport. Mr John Vine CBE QPM is the Independent Chief Inspector of the UK Border Agency. He conducted an inspection of Manchester Airport between 5 and 7 May 2010. In his report, Mr Vine lists a number of problems with the smart gates in use there. And then, at para.5.29, he writes: We could find no overall plan to evaluate the success or otherwise of the facial recognition gates at Manchester Airport and would urge the Agency to do so [as] soon as possible.
It is hard to believe that the Home Office have been wasting public money on biometrics. But if we must entertain that thought, must we also make room for the thought that the Home Office haven't even been conducting the trials they keep talking about? How else are we to understand the Independent Chief Inspector's words, "We could find no overall plan to evaluate the success or otherwise of the facial recognition gates at Manchester Airport"?

Whitehall on trials

Appendix
Home Secretary, somewhat late in the day, herewith the appendix promised in my open letter to you dated 8 November 2011.

The fourth enquiry – into the efficacy of the biometrics used by UKBA and the Home Office generally – has at its disposal a lot of evidence in the form of correspondence with the Home Office, the UK Border Agency, the Identity & Passport Service, the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, the Information Commissioner and the Information Rights Tribunal available here, here, here and here. The enquiry may also be assisted by reading the reports on biometrics here, here and here.

The hypothesis that the enquiry needs to test is that:

For 10 years the Home Office have been investing public money unwisely in projects which depend for their success on mass consumer biometrics technology being reliable – it isn't.