IPS temporarily Rapsonless

The Identity & Passport Service (IPS) doesn't exist any more, of course, it's now HM Passport Office (HMPO) and the Home Office is IPSless.

The executive director of IPS between about June 2010 and March 2013 was Sarah Rapson. Her predecessor, James Hall, presided over the British public being over-charged for passports by about £300 million a year. He also presided over the disaster of Whitehall's attempted introduction of state-produced ID cards.

Ms Rapson has delivered a £5 reduction in the cost of a 10-year adult passport since then, from £77.50 to £72.50. Otherwise her tenure seems to have been without incident.

She is perhaps lucky that IPS/HMPO were banned from having anything to do with Whitehall's latest attempt to re-enact the ID cards massacre – that honour goes to the Cabinet Office (individual electoral registration and the Identity Assurance Programme) and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (midata). If you hold futures in either organisation, sell, sell, sell.

Now her luck has broken.

Home Office press release, 16 April 2013:

New interim Directors General appointed Two interim Directors General have been appointed to lead the new immigration commands in the Home Office that were announced by the Home Secretary on 26 March. Sarah Rapson will lead UK Visas and Immigration, bringing her experience of managing a successful customer-focused organisation as Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service. David Wood will lead Immigration Enforcement, drawing on his background with the Metropolitan Police and as Director of Operations for UKBA ...

The history of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) is spectacular and its demise under Rob Whiteman even more so. The Home Office is now UKBAless. It's shattered into three pieces – the UK Border Force, Immigration Enforcement (ambiguous name) and the piece Ms Rapson has picked up, UK Visas and Immigration (UKV&I).

Interim Director General Sarah Rapson gave evidence in front of the Home Affairs Committee on 11 June 2013:



Next day, the Times newspaper reported the session and found themselves with an over-abundance or superfluity or excess or nimiety of scoops. Too many to handle. They settled for Visa system might never be up to job, admits chief.

A month later, the Home Affairs Committee published their report, and they went with Backlogs hit half a million at immigration service. This followed Ms Rapson's revelation that there are 190,000 unresolved immigration cases that her predecessors unfortunately forgot to tell the Committee about.

The Times and the Committee and the BBC could equally well have led with Ms Rapson's management approach – she wants her staff to discover for themselves how to do the job, she doesn't intend to issue "decrees" (16:34:40 to 16:35:44), instead, she's holding "workshops". She has 7,400 staff in 150 countries and an annual budget of £450 million. There's something missing from the concept of leadership there or "command" as Ms Rapson keeps calling it.

Or they could have led with Ms Rapson's repeated claim to have only just started in the job – e.g. "I'm 54 days in" (16:59:43). According to the DMossEsq slide rule, that's nearly eight weeks. Eight weeks in, and she still doesn't know how many categories there are for the cases UKV&I deal with and didn't realise that the category with 190,000 cases in it was new to the Committee. Clearly it takes some time for a new boss to get their feet under the table, but surely eight weeks is long enough to get to grips with some of the basic metrics of the business. If eight weeks isn't long enough, is it ever going to happen?

IPS temporarily Rapsonless

The Identity & Passport Service (IPS) doesn't exist any more, of course, it's now HM Passport Office (HMPO) and the Home Office is IPSless.

The executive director of IPS between about June 2010 and March 2013 was Sarah Rapson. Her predecessor, James Hall, presided over the British public being over-charged for passports by about £300 million a year. He also presided over the disaster of Whitehall's attempted introduction of state-produced ID cards.

Ms Rapson has delivered a £5 reduction in the cost of a 10-year adult passport since then, from £77.50 to £72.50. Otherwise her tenure seems to have been without incident.

She is perhaps lucky that IPS/HMPO were banned from having anything to do with Whitehall's latest attempt to re-enact the ID cards massacre – that honour goes to the Cabinet Office (individual electoral registration and the Identity Assurance Programme) and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (midata). If you hold futures in either organisation, sell, sell, sell.

Now her luck has broken.

UKBA soon to be Whitemanless

Home Office press release, 27 June 2013:

Rob Whiteman leaves Home Office for new Chief Executive role Rob Whiteman, Director General of Operational Systems Transformation, is leaving the Home Office to become Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. Rob Whiteman, Director General of Operational Systems Transformation, is to leave his role at the Home Office to join the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) as its new Chief Executive.

When he joined in July 2011, Mr Whiteman was chief executive of the UK Border Agency (UKBA). Eight months later in March 2012 he lost the UK Border Force, which was but is no longer part of UKBA. And a year after that in March 2013, the remainder of UKBA was split in two. Leaving Mr Whiteman with nothing to be chief executive of, any more, at least at the Home Office.

Good luck CIPFA.

How many pieces will CIPFA be broken into by March 2015?

As Theresa May, the Home Secretary, says archly in the press release:

He leaves with my very best wishes for the future and I am sure he will be a great success in his important new role at CIPFA.

And what does Mark Sedwill, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, have to say about the trail of destruction which is Mr Whiteman's career at UKBA? He speaks in Mandarin, of course, but you can probably manage your own translation:

Rob has made a remarkable contribution to the Home Office over the past 18 months and, on behalf of the department, I would like to thank him for his dedication and leadership.

The Home Affairs Committee routinely accuse UKBA and the Home Office of withholding information and going back on their word. It's not just the lack of accountability the Committee doesn't like. In one excruciating evidence session (15 May 2012), they also unmasked Mr Whiteman as the victim of producer capture, a common Whitehall affliction:

Q151 Chair: ... over the issue of your computer system that crashed at Lunar house. Hundreds of people were turned away, and we hear that some were in tears at the fact that the system did not work. What went wrong? Have we got compensation from the IT company? Will it happen again, and have we rearranged all the appointments? Rob Whiteman: We contacted people over the bank holiday weekend and rearranged appointments. Around 500 appointments that were cancelled were rearranged. The issues around IT are incredibly frustrating for my staff, as well as for our customers. When I meet staff, it is a constant frustration that systems do not work all the time and that some of the resilience issues do not conform to common standards. In terms of morale and other issues, it is absolutely vital that we get to the heart of these IT problems. They are complex, yes, but- Q152 Chair: Yes, but we do not want to go into that now. Do we know why it broke down? Rob Whiteman: We do know why it broke down. It was an error on the network that affected the way appointments were queued from the system, and therefore they could not travel properly around the network. It was an IT failure, but, to answer your question, I have discussed this several times with the Chief Executive of the IT company that is the primary IT provider. Q153 Chair: What is the company? Rob Whiteman: I would rather not say. Q154 Chair: I am sorry, Mr Whiteman; this is a Select Committee of the House- Rob Whiteman: It is Atos. Q155 Chair: There is no need to be secret with us; we will find out. It is public money. It is not coming out of your pocket. The taxpayer is paying. What is the name of the company? Rob Whiteman: Atos. Q156 Chair: And what was his explanation as to why it broke down? Rob Whiteman: The reason I was reluctant, Chairman, is that we have a contract with Atos. It is trying its best to resolve the issues, but obviously we are being a demanding client and saying that performance is not good enough. Q157 Chair: As you should be. Rob Whiteman: I would not want to cast aspersions on the effort that it is making. It has put an additional team in to try to analyse the problem, and I receive daily and weekly reports from them. The point I would make is that in terms of UKBA improving over the next couple of years ...

Being chief executive of UKBA as was, was probably an impossible job, beyond any human being, and Mr Whiteman is just a human being.

That conclusion is a bit mundane for some. They like something more dramatic in the Guardian. Here's an extract from an open letter they published, from David Walker to Mr Whiteman:

Congratulations on finding a safe passage out of the Whitehall jungle. Senior people at the Home Office, especially those anywhere near the borders, have proved pretty expendable of late, and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) job came at the right time. Some say those who live by the sword die by the sword. You shafted the UK Border Force's Brodie Clark on behalf of Theresa May and you, in turn, have been shafted by the new permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, on behalf of Theresa May. She sails on, the Tory leadership in her sights, while all around good people fall to their deaths.

"All around good people fall to their deaths"? That hasn't been reported in the Guardian. Or anywhere else.

Anyway, take your pick, mundane or murderous.

UKBA soon to be Whitemanless

Home Office press release, 27 June 2013:

Rob Whiteman leaves Home Office for new Chief Executive role Rob Whiteman, Director General of Operational Systems Transformation, is leaving the Home Office to become Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. Rob Whiteman, Director General of Operational Systems Transformation, is to leave his role at the Home Office to join the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) as its new Chief Executive.

When he joined in July 2011, Mr Whiteman was chief executive of the UK Border Agency (UKBA). Eight months later in March 2012 he lost the UK Border Force, which was but is no longer part of UKBA. And a year after that in March 2013, the remainder of UKBA was split in two. Leaving Mr Whiteman with nothing to be chief executive of, any more, at least at the Home Office.

Good luck CIPFA.

How many pieces will CIPFA be broken into by March 2015?

English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force 2

At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.

The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.

This mistake has been usefully pointed out by an anonymous commenter.

The newspaper reports of Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip state that: "He used a self check-in kiosk to board the Virgin Atlantic flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag drop area". DMossEsq confused "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates" and concluded that this was an example of the unreliability of the face recognition biometrics used by smart gates. Face recognition biometrics are laughably unreliable but as Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris hadn't used a smart gate that's irrelevant in this case and DMossEsq wishes to apologise for misleading readers.

How did DMossEsq confuse "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates"? Frustration. Undischarged anger. Leading to occasional blind spots.

What's frustrating? The Home Office spend a fortune on security systems that depend for their success on biometrics being reliable. Then when you take them to court to make them publish the evidence, they refuse to do so and add that the trials they carried out were so specific that the results wouldn't tell the public anything anyway. In other words, the Home Office have no justification for spending our money on biometrics.

This misfeasance has been going on under every Home Secretary since David Blunkett and under two Permanent Secretaries – Sir David Normington and Dame Helen Ghosh. Now we have a new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Mark Sedwill. Let's see if he's any better. Any less frustrating.

----------

* Border control failures:-

1. Leaving the UK. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK travelling on someone else's passport, Mr Andrew McMaster's. A UK Border Force officer must have checked at passport control and decided that the photograph in the passport looked enough like Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris. An understandable mistake. But a mistake nevertheless.

2. Entering the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's flat print fingerprints didn't match Mr McMaster's which must presumably have been already on file. He failed his primary inspection and was referred for secondary inspection. He didn't turn up. Instead, he managed to get out of the airport. Flat print fingerprinting registers false non-matches about 20 percent of the time, so it's perfectly normal for people to fail primary inspection, it's not a sign of the technology working properly, rather the opposite. The non-match won't have rung any alarm bells but, nevertheless, he shouldn't have been able to avoid secondary inspection and leave the premises.

3. Leaving the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris, having entered the US as Andrew McMaster, left using his own passport as Paul Harris. (a) Border control for non-US citizens is meant to match entry and exit details. There would have been no entry details for Paul Harris. As far as the system was concerned, Paul Harris was leaving the US without ever having come in. It looks like a mistake to miss that. (b) His ticket was presumably in the name of Andrew McMaster. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to leave the US on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?

4. Entering the UK. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to enter the UK on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?

How could the mismatch between the names on the airline ticket and the passport have been discovered? The expensive answer is "eBorders".

As a taxpayer, you have spent a fortune on ePassports and smart gates. They don't work. In the name of border security, you have also spent a fortune on a system called eBorders, which logs all the details of your flights and is meant to provide the raw intelligence to keep the border safe. Clearly eBorders doesn't work either. Otherwise the mismatch between passport and ticket would have been spotted. You have also spent a fortune making hundreds of Border Force staff redundant, to be replaced by computer systems, and then re-hiring them when the Home Office found the computer systems don't work.

You've spent the money. The systems don't work. The staff don't do anything with the data that's collected. But don't worry. The border is secure.

English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force 2

At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.

The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.

English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force

The leader of the English Defence League is a man called Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Or Tommy Robinson. Or Paul Harris.

Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.

The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.

Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:

The head of the English Defence League has learnt the hard way that those fingerprint scanners at JFK actually work. gu.com/p/3cqgq/tw — Fraser Nelson (@frasernelson) January 7, 2013

There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.

There are other questions.

How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...

Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.

Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK on a false passport:

He used a self check-in kiosk to board the Virgin Atlantic flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag drop area.

Those "self check-in kiosks" or "eGates" or "smart gates" or whatever you want to call them have cost the British taxpayer a fortune. And they don't work. Will the UK Border Force please stop wasting our money on eGates? And will they please stop pretending that eGates provide any sort of border security?

English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force

The leader of the English Defence League is a man called Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Or Tommy Robinson. Or Paul Harris.

Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.

The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.

Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:

The head of the English Defence League has learnt the hard way that those fingerprint scanners at JFK actually work. gu.com/p/3cqgq/tw — Fraser Nelson (@frasernelson) January 7, 2013

There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.

There are other questions.

How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...

Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

It's 10 years since the Home Office published their consultation on what became known as "ID cards", Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud – A Consultation Paper. Crucial to the system was the belief that all 60 million of us in the UK could be identified by various biometrics, specifically facial geometry and flat print fingerprints.

Utter cockpoppy, the technology's simply not up to it. But the choice had been made. By December 2010, when the Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed, the Home Office confessed to £292 million of our money having been wasted on the scheme, with nothing to show for it.

The waste goes on. We're wasting money on biometrics in Sarah Rapson's ePassports. We're wasting money on Jackie Keane's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System. That takes in eGates that don't work at UK airports and UK visa application checking systems that don't work all over the world. As part of Project Lantern, the police are deploying mobile fingerprinting equipment that doesn't work. And DWP are threatening to use voice biometrics that don't work for their new Universal Credit system.

It goes on because of one wrong choice made 10 years ago. The reliability of the products wasn't checked properly and adverse evidence was ignored. Typical headstrong proletarian behaviour, no idea what's in anyone's best interests, naïve consumers, too much money burning a hole in their pocket, just buy it because it looks good on TV and sounds modern.

How can you help?

You can write to ministers and their officials. That doesn't help. You can write magazine articles and letters to newspapers and comments on blogs and you can write your own blog. You can speak at public meetings and on the radio. That doesn't help. You can have meetings at the Home Office and ditto. You can respond to government consultations and attend government briefings. Fat lot of good it'll do you. You can write to your MP. He or she will get an answer for you. But it won't help. Whitehall wants biometrics and Whitehall's jolly well going to have biometrics, never mind if they don't work.

So then you have another idea. Get reinforcements. Call on organisations that have institutional power.

When the Home Office start advertising their misbegotten ID cards scheme and making unrealistic claims for the reliability of today's mass consumer biometrics, you report them to the Advertising Standards Authority. Brilliant. Except that there's nothing the ASA can do in this case.

So then you submit a freedom of information request asking what justification the Home Office have for investing public money in expensive systems which depend for their success on biometrics being reliable which they aren't and the Home Office know that perfectly well and therefore know that all or some of our money will be wasted. 2½ years later, thanks to the First-Tier Tribunal (Information Rights), you're 2½ years older and none the wiser, Whitehall continue bone-headedly against all the evidence to waste our money on biometrics.

Then Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, makes an important point:

One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate.

Honest political debate? Maybe the UKSA can help. Maybe if they or the Office for National Statistics said that the biometrics technology being considered is not reliable enough, then the Home Office would stop wasting our money? No good. The UKSA can only comment on official statistics. And the statistics adduced from the UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial aren't official.

This attempt to help the Home Office to make evidence-based policy and to face up to their mistake – choosing to rely on flaky biometrics – clearly goes back years. Lots of effort. No results. The fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate still eludes us.

And then Andrew Watson succeeds through a freedom of information request in getting the National Policing Improvement Agency's own internal report on mobile fingerprinting equipment published.

The report is full of statistics, it's marked "Restricted-Commercial", it's got Northrop Grumman's logo on it and it's been prepared for the Police Information Technology Organisation (the old name for the National Policing improvement Agency). Official, or what?

By this stage, Sir Michael Scholar has been replaced by Andrew Dilnot as chair of the UKSA. Can Mr Dilnot comment on the reliability of mass consumer biometrics? No. The statistics still aren't official enough:

From: xxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of authority enquiries Sent: 01 August 2012 23:19 To: 'David Moss' Subject: Re: Misleading use by the Home Office and others of statistics associated with biometrics Dear Mr Moss Thank you for your email to Andrew Dilnot regarding biometric information. I am replying on Andrew's behalf. We have considered this matter in discussion with David Blunt, the Head of Profession for Statistics at the Home Office. We share Mr Blunt's view that the studies to which you refer are not official statistics, and we understand from the Home Office that there are no current plans for official statistics in this area to be produced. As you will be aware from our earlier replies, the Authority's statutory remit covers official statistics as set out in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Our view therefore is that this remains a matter about which we would continue to encourage you to maintain a dialogue with relevant Home Office officials directly. We understand that you attended a meeting with Home Office officials in spring 2010 and, following further correspondence, you received a reply from the National Policing Improvement Agency in June 2010 regarding the specifics of the issues that concerned you. I am sorry that we are unable to assist you further at the present time. Kind regards xxxxxxxxxx Private Secretary to Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority

UK Border Force staff are laid off in the expectation that they can be replaced by biometric technology, then the queues at the airport get too long because the technology doesn't work and the staff have to be re-hired, but still Whitehall remains incapable of justifying its investment of public money in biometric technology which is too unreliable to do the jobs demanded of it. Incapable and unwilling.

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices. And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

Probably not the last victim of Sir David Normington's success

Sometimes it seems as if half the senior decision-makers in Whitehall are former Accenture partners.

But no-one writes "there must be something rotten at Accenture, when so many of their partners are on a veritable stampede for the exit".

Unlike Accenture, the UK public sector employs about six million people. (Six million!) But when one of them announced her departure last month, Dame Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Home Office, what did Sue Cameron write in the Telegraph?

Why are Whitehall's top mandarins running for the exit? There must be something rotten in the Coalition, when so many of our top civil servants are on a veritable stampede for the exit. Right across government the mandarins are shaking the dust of Whitehall from their feet and moving on to bigger, better jobs elsewhere. They include senior officials at Education, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, International Development, Energy, and the Home Office ...

The BBC profile of her reminds listeners of the time when Dame Helen was called before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to explain various mishaps that took place at DEFRA while she was permanent secretary there. With "the public interest" striped into her very bones like a stick of seaside rock, Dame Helen refused to attend and had to be ordered.

She was there again yesterday, up in front of the beak, Margaret Hodge, trying to explain why she had had to hire back UK Border Agency staff and UK Border Force staff who had been previously laid off with tens of thousands of pounds in severance pay in the name of government cuts. According to Martin Beckford in the Telegraph:

Dame Helen ... defended the arrangements by saying that all of the returnees had to wait at least six months before going back to work, otherwise they would have had to repay the lump sums.

Simon Jenkins isn't going to put up with a non sequitur like that when Dame Helen is working for the real National Trust and apparently the PAC wasn't having any truck with it either:

She did however admit that the Border Agency – which has faced repeated criticism for losing track of illegal immigrants, allowing in bogus students and causing delays at airports – had got rid of too many people too quickly since the election as it tried to cut costs.

Maybe the Home Office will survive her loss after all. There could even be an article in it for Sue Cameron. And this time maybe she'll pay a bit of attention to Sir David Normington.

----------

Televised proceedings of yesterday's PAC:



See also:
Nicholas Watt, 6 March 2011, The Guardian, David Cameron calls civil servants 'enemies of enterprise'
Jill Sherman and Richard Ford, 15 November 2011, The Times, Borders row blocks first woman from top Civil Service job
Editorial, 15 March 2012, The Guardian, Civil servants and MPs: settling accounts
Patrick Wintour, 13 April 2012, The Guardian, Civil service exodus sees one third of senior officials leave
Christopher Hope, 13 April 2012, The Telegraph, A quarter of senior civil servants quit Whitehall under Coalition
Jill Sherman, 18 June 2012, The Times, Ministers demand right to sack Whitehall mandarins

Probably not the last victim of Sir David Normington's success

Sometimes it seems as if half the senior decision-makers in Whitehall are former Accenture partners.

But no-one writes "there must be something rotten at Accenture, when so many of their partners are on a veritable stampede for the exit".

Home Office soon to be Ghoshless

Home Office press release, 13 August 2012:

Dame Helen Ghosh to leave civil service Dame Helen Ghosh DCB is to step down as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office to take up the role of Director General of the National Trust, she announced today. Dame Helen will leave the department in September after a 33 year career in the civil service ... Head of the Civil Service Sir Bob Kerslake said: 'As Permanent Secretary at Defra and the Home Office, Helen has delivered extraordinary change including departmental reform, the independent UK Border Force and support for the successful London Olympics. 'She has been an inspiring leader, who has made a very strong corporate contribution, both via the Civil Service Board, leading the capability strand of our Civil Service Reform Programme and as a vibrant role model and champion of talent and diversity. I wish her every success in her new leadership role at the National Trust.' Helen Kilpatrick, Director General of the Financial and Commercial Group, will stand in as interim Permanent Secretary until a replacement for Helen Ghosh is appointed.

National Trust press release, 13 August 2012:

Dame Helen Ghosh DCB will be the next Director-General of the National Trust ... She will take over from Fiona Reynolds who has been at the helm for nearly 12 years ... Fiona Reynolds ... moves on to become Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2013 ...

Emmanuel College past events, 6 March 2012:

London Drinks Café Koha in London’s Leicester Square once again played host to informal drinks on the evening of Tuesday 6th March ... The timing of the event meant that members were able to mark the sad passing of Lord St. John of Fawsley (which meant a wealth of affectionate anecdotes about his time as Master) and also celebrate the news from earlier in the day of the appointment of Dame Fiona Reynolds as our next Master.

Emmanuel can give six months notice of the Master's successor. The National Trust can give six weeks notice of the Director-General's successor. That is orderly and proper. The Home Office can't tell us who Dame Helen's successor will be, six weeks or so before she leaves. That looks messy – lessons there for Sir Bob from Emma and the NT.

Dame Helen's move could hardly be announced before the Olympics were over. They didn't exactly wait for long after the closing ceremony, though, did they.

The Sunday Times told us on 15 July 2012:

Originally, it was decided that 10,000 guards, including any military contingent, would be required on peak days. By December, that figure was revised up to 23,700 with G4S providing 13,700 trained guards, including 3,300 students. Dame Helen Ghosh, the Home Office permanent secretary, admitted last December that the initial estimate had been a “finger in the air” estimate, based on information from the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin.

That finger in the air was Sir David Normington's, Dame Helen's slippery predecessor. He left her a mess. She didn't sort it out and the army had to be called in at undignified short notice.

The independent UK Border Force, for the creation of which Sir Bob praises Dame Helen, was the clumsy response to an absolute fiasco – the Brodie Clark affair.

Dame Helen will find it very different working with the great Simon Jenkins at the National Trust after decades of more or less biddable ministers.

Who called the shots in what looks like Dame Helen's ejection? Ministers? Maybe. Sir Bob Kerslake? Sir Jeremy Heywood? Maybe. Considerable power lies with the suppliers these days, IBM, CapGemini, HP, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Fujitsu, CSC, Atos and suchlike. Did they want her out? Was she standing up to them? Will we miss her as a result? None of us on the outside has a clue what's going on. We are left making convoluted surmises like this because so much of Whitehall is cloaked in secrecy. That is not, in the end, did they but know it, to the advantage of senior civil servants.

And for us, the public? Dame Helen's successor? We'll see. Let's hope for one who is more open with the Home Affairs Committee and, indeed, the public.

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BBC Radio 4, Profile: Dame Helen Ghosh

Home Office soon to be Ghoshless

Home Office press release, 13 August 2012:

Dame Helen Ghosh to leave civil service Dame Helen Ghosh DCB is to step down as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office to take up the role of Director General of the National Trust, she announced today. Dame Helen will leave the department in September after a 33 year career in the civil service ... Head of the Civil Service Sir Bob Kerslake said: 'As Permanent Secretary at Defra and the Home Office, Helen has delivered extraordinary change including departmental reform, the independent UK Border Force and support for the successful London Olympics. 'She has been an inspiring leader, who has made a very strong corporate contribution, both via the Civil Service Board, leading the capability strand of our Civil Service Reform Programme and as a vibrant role model and champion of talent and diversity. I wish her every success in her new leadership role at the National Trust.' Helen Kilpatrick, Director General of the Financial and Commercial Group, will stand in as interim Permanent Secretary until a replacement for Helen Ghosh is appointed.

National Trust press release, 13 August 2012:

Biometrics – don't ask, don't tell

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way. That's what we were saying back in May.

Don't ask
DMossEsq wrote to his MP asking about this matter. Would Nick Herbert, the policing minister, care to comment? Or the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)? Could they explain why public money is being wasted on technology that doesn't work?

And thanks to his MP an answer has now come through from Chief Constable Nick Gargan, Chief Executive of NPIA.

Don't tell
Does Mr Gargan express confidence in the biometrics being used? No.

Does he say that mobile fingerprinting will improve crime prevention or crime detection or crime clear-up rates? No.

He doesn't disagree that there is a 20% failure rate associated with flat print fingerprinting based on the 2004 UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial.

Rather endearingly – obviously a conservative man with a respect for tradition – he tries on the old line that the biometrics enrolment trial wasn't really a biometrics enrolment trial but it won't wash.

That high 20% failure rate in the biometrics enrolment trial was caused, he says, by using only a small sensor to scan people's fingerprints. That was then. Policemen on patrol are now being issued with so-called "Bluecheck" devices. And what do they use? According to Mr Gargan, only a small sensor to scan people's fingerprints.

The technology has improved, he claims. Is the failure rate down from 20% to 2%? Or 0.2%? He doesn't say. All he says is that the technology has improved. An unsupported and unquantified assertion.

What's the point?
"Finally and perhaps most importantly", Mr Gargan says, policemen on patrol can always ignore the Bluecheck results and take suspects down to the station anyway.

Don't worry
The Home Office are investing your money wisely. You are much safer as a result.

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Cribsheet
Given the choice of two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the English choose one and the Italians the other. Whereas we might say in English that the scale of the deception being practised on the public by the Home Office is "gargantuan", for example, in Italian they would call it "pantagruelico". Not many people know that.

Gustave Doré's 1873 illustration for Gargantua,
the second (1534) of
François Rabelais's series of five novels,
La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel

Biometrics – don't ask, don't tell

Police forces all over the UK are introducing mobile fingerprint equipment. Result? Approximately 20% of the criminals who would otherwise have been taken down to the station will now be asked politely to go on their way. That's what we were saying back in May.

Don't ask
DMossEsq wrote to his MP asking about this matter. Would Nick Herbert, the policing minister, care to comment? Or the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA)? Could they explain why public money is being wasted on technology that doesn't work?

And thanks to his MP an answer has now come through from Chief Constable Nick Gargan, Chief Executive of NPIA.

It's the way he tells 'em

Woody Allen: "This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs".

DMossEsq: "This permanent secretary goes to a politician and says, Minister, biometrics don't work. But we keep spending money on them. The politician says, Well, why don’t you lock up the cheque book? And the permanent secretary says, I would but I need an identity assurance system".

It's the way he tells 'em

Woody Allen: "This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs".

DMossEsq: "This permanent secretary goes to a politician and says, Minister, biometrics don't work. But we keep spending money on them. The politician says, Well, why don’t you lock up the cheque book? And the permanent secretary says, I would but I need an identity assurance system".

HMG's cloud computing strategy – there isn't one – and the Edgbaston Test

On 20 October 2011 Chris Chant listed 23 symptoms of the illness which Government IT suffers from. He carried on energetically repeating his diagnosis, unchallenged, and promoting cloud computing as the effective prescription. There he was, at it again, six months later on 11 April 2012, in a blog post on the G-Cloud website, #Unacceptable IT is pervasive. Two days later his resignation was announced.

The man in charge of G-Cloud is Andy Nelson, the Government's Chief Information Officer (CIO). That's only a part-time job. He is more fully occupied as CIO at the Ministry of Justice, where he's got his work cut out with Libra among other things. Libra is the £467 million Fujitsu system which is meant to produce the accounts for HM Courts and Tribunals Service. When the National Audit Office saw the 2010-11 accounts they were in such a mess that the NAO couldn't even qualify their opinion, they had to disclaim an opinion.

Under Mr Nelson, Denise McDonagh is also responsible for G-Cloud. Again, it's only a part-time job. Her day job is CIO at the Home Office. And again, there are quite a few distractions there:

• There's the £385 million CSC contract with Sarah Rapson's Identity & Passport Service which is one of the reasons UK passport-holders are currently being over-charged by £300 million a year.
• There's the £265 million IBM contract with the UK Border Agency to provide IABS, Jackie Keane's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System. IABS is meant to keep the UK border secure and make the 2012 Olympics safe but there's a problem – the biometrics don't work.
• The same problem applies to the National Policing Improvement Agency's promotion of MobileID, a system to allow policemen on patrol to check suspects' fingerprints on the spot using mobile equipment. The idea is for MobileID to save police time. Which it will because, with a 20% failure rate, this flaky technology will cause 20% fewer criminals to be arrested.

Those distractions and others will no doubt explain her lacklustre post on 26 April 2012, Cloud Cynicism (or Dispelling the Dark Clouds) and why she hasn't been heard from since.

Not so, Eleanor Stewart. She's a trouper. She's the Assistant Director of G-Cloud and she's always good for a lively post. On 27 April 2012 she produced Crowdsourcing and a response., in which she took up some of the many questions posed in the 20 responses to Chris Chant's last post.

What the heck can we do to resolve some of the scary and largely unknown legal and policy issues that people are nervous about in a globalised world?, she asked. Good question. No answer.

And What ‘worked examples’ might we be able to provide to ... sceptics? That's in response to the simple question how cloud computing is supposed to obviate the need for long contracts to produce systems like Libra, for example, or IABS or DWP's Universal Credit. Chris Chant says it will. How? No answer.

Ms Stewart threw the post open to the crowd. And published one comment. One. The limiting case of a crowd. (I wandered lonely as a cloud?)

"Scary and largely unknown"? Hmm. Quite clearly, no-one in HMG knows the answers to some very basic questions about its cloud computing strategy. Which is odd. They keep talking about it. Andy Nelson, for example, was holding forth at the Cloud Computing World Forum only the other day. And they've been advocating it for years – the G-Cloud Overview was being touted in August 2010. But still no-one can answer the questions.

Is it all hot air? A cloud of hot air? A cloud which, when it hits some of the colder patches of reality, results in heavy precipitation and the wettest drought ever seen, which washed out the Edgbaston Test? That's certainly what it looks like at this end of the wicket.

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A version of this post has been kindly published by the estimable PublicTechnology.net

HMG's cloud computing strategy – there isn't one – and the Edgbaston Test

On 20 October 2011 Chris Chant listed 23 symptoms of the illness which Government IT suffers from. He carried on energetically repeating his diagnosis, unchallenged, and promoting cloud computing as the effective prescription. There he was, at it again, six months later on 11 April 2012, in a blog post on the G-Cloud website, #Unacceptable IT is pervasive. Two days later his resignation was announced.