With five suppliers – all those still left in the procurement race – having been chosen to work with the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) to deliver the UK’s National Identity Scheme (NIS), and 3M-SPSL being awarded a contract to produce ID cards for critical workers, Identity Loop posed some pressing questions to Bill Crothers, Commercial Executive Director at IPS.

 

IDLOOP: All five of the companies that were still in the running for producing the ID card system were confirmed as being part of the supplier group today. How can this have been a competitive process, if no supplier was unsuccessful?

 

BC: This is a good question. Originally we had some 40 bidders wanting to take part in the scheme, which we whittled down to eight. We then underwent a process of meetings and information exchange – up to 150 meetings and 1000s of pages of detailed information – with each of the suppliers. We gave each supplier very frank feedback on their bids and on how they were doing. Subsequently, three of those companies decided to withdraw from the process. (Ed Note: These were Steria, Accenture and BAE Systems.) Steria is now back in the process as a subcontractor to CSC. We were not at all disappointed at the withdrawal of these three particular companies. We were left with five very good, capable candidates.

 

IDLOOP: So why didn’t you then whittle the five down further?

 

BC: We did think pretty hard as to whether to reduce the number to four companies. But we had assessed each of these companies on three key areas, such as their capability to deliver the project, their commercial arrangements, and on whether they understood IPS values on behaviour and cooperation. All five companies easily passed these tests and had close scores, so there was no good reason to loose one of them. Not only that, but in terms of competitiveness, we now have five companies bidding for each of the individual contracts on offer, and that will clearly be more competitive than four.

 

IDLOOP: And your views on Steria being back in the process?

 

BC: It was CSC’s call and we are perfectly happy with this. The requirements on being a subcontractor are substantially different to being a primary contractor.

 

IDLOOP: The political outlook for the national identity card scheme doesn’t look too healthy, with the Conservative Party reiterating their intent to cancel this project if they were to return to power. How do you and the suppliers view this backdrop?

 

BC: A lot of what we are procuring will be replacements of existing capabilities, but with the ID card element added on. In fact about a dozen contracts are up for renewal in the next few years. For example a replacement of our system for passport application and enrolment currently run by Siemens will be rebid, but have an ID card element added. So if the ID card process was cancelled a lot of the procurement process would still be perfectly valid. Even if there is a termination, we have stuck to the government’s standard on this – there have been no extra factors built in to take account of the political scene. Our suppliers have been happy with the situation too.

 

IDLOOP: You have awarded 3M-SPSL a contract to produce certain ID cards. Can you explain how and why they were able to secure this deal despite not being one of the five companies chosen?

 

BC: 3M-SPSL currently produces the UK’s biometric passport and we needed somebody in the short term to fulfil this ID card requirement for critical workers. It is not a massive deal – certainly less than £10 million. Somebody had the foresight when handling 3M’s original passport contract to include a provision for this early stage of ID card output, so it represents a change to the existing contract rather than a new contract altogether.