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Rhetorical confidence and technological certainty in technology led policy initiatives
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"12/10/2007
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It has been nearly 18 months since the Identity Card Act received Royal Assent and yet the procurement process has only just begun. Even now, only two projects have so far been approved: the replacement of core processes for passports and the replacement and upgrading of the existing systems for fingerprint matching and storage in connection with immigration and visa requirements. Such slow progress towards the implementation of the scheme is perhaps puzzling, given the government’s confidence in its plans during the Parliamentary deliberations about the scheme. This raises important questions about the way in which technology–led policies are considered in the UK.
While the Bill was being debated in Parliament, Home Office ministers assured MPs that they were confident that the technology underlying the scheme was “well established”, that the scheme had successfully passed various Office of Government Commerce Gateway reviews and that the government had learned the lessons of previous IT failures and as a result knew “exactly what they are doing now”. Indeed, in June 2006 a Home Office minister told the science and technology select committee that the Home Office was not “anticipating something major that would completely delay or derail the programme”.
Shortly thereafter, however, the Home Office delayed the implementation, undertook a wholesale review of the scheme and issued a new strategic action plan in December 2006 that made a number of fundamental changes to the technological design of the scheme.
More recently, the procurement ‘prospectus’, issued in August 2007, now speaks of “a set of challenging issues” that are still to be resolved and a scheme that could “change over time as a result of the current review of delivery options”.
This new position is very different from the earlier one that knew ‘exactly what we are doing’ and drew on ‘well established’ technologies. The prospectus justifies this new position because the scheme “is a large scale, long term business transformation programme involving multiple stakeholders” that “will exist in an environment of ongoing change as well as emerging technologies”.
For academia and industry the idea that large scale systems will, in all likelihood, change and develop before they are finally implemented is hardly a novel insight. Yet, when the scheme was being debated in Parliament, the rhetoric from the government was almost exclusively framed in terms of certainty about the technology, its implementation and its likely costs.
This rhetoric was presumably used because the Home Office felt that the only way it could pass the legislation was by presenting its confidence in the scheme in terms of certainty about its technological implementation. In so doing, however, it confused rhetorical confidence with technological certainty. As a result of this confusion any changes to the technological components of the scheme may immediately affect underlying confidence in the scheme as a whole.
With large scale IT systems underpinning many developments in public policy it is perhaps time for Parliamentarians of all hues to acknowledge that technological certainty about system implementation is an unrealistic and unnecessary part of the deliberation process; instead attention should be focused on the extent to which any such proposals are the most effective ways of addressing particular policy goals and objectives; a debate that questions government confidence in the underlying proposal without being tied to unachievable technological certainties.
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