NO2ID

From the current issue of Private Eye (unfortunately, I can't even find the article title on the website: private-eye.co.uk) - my summary:

Mapeley, the offshore company that owns HM Revenue and Customs buildings through a Bermudan subsidiary, has won the contract to manage the new "authentication centres" where applicants for the new biometric passport will be interviewed and have biometric data recorded.

The lease fees paid by HMRC for use of the building now go to a holding company in Guernsey, where of course no UK tax is charged. The Passport-authentication deal is underwritten by a (possibly different), Guernsey-registered company, Mapeley Ltd.

While the passport service will lease buildings from a UK company (Mapeley Estates Ltd), there's nothing to stop this company from leasing the buildings from offshore, thus avoiding any UK tax (exactly as happened in the case of the HMRC building).

What this amounts to, is that what we're expected to cough up for biometric passports, and probably ID cards in turn, will be profit for a company that avoids UK tax!

Yup - the Eye doesn't publish it's 'serious' stories on its website. There are further details here:

http://www.bipcontracts.com/cgi-bin/newsroom/newsroom.cgi?action=full_story&act=view_news_list&act2=view_news_list&strt=0&id=47295

(originally from the FT but the story is now subject to registration)

I've not found any further details of the UK Passport Agency's contract for these centres.

However, this contract from DVLA may be of interest - and relevance:

http://dvla.g2b.info/cgi-gen/profile.pl ... 16&ctype=2

UK-Swansea: Facial Recognition Trial for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)


The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency(DVLA) issues approximately 7 million driving licences every year throughout the UK. Its database currently holds over 35 million records, 20 million of these relate to photocard driving licences and contain a colour image of the driver.

The purpose of this trial is to determine if facial images derived from passport photographs and currently being held by the DVLA in a computerised database can be used for machine assisted face recognition; to determine if new images derived from upgraded scanning equipment capable of meeting the ICAO 9303 standard are suitable and achieve an acceptable level of performance with machine-assisted face recognition; to advise on how best to adapt the existing process and technology to realise best performance when using machine-assisted face recognition.

It makes me think I must be Nostradamus II or whatever. I actually included in my letter to all of the Lords that it would likely be processed offshore. How could I have known such a thing???

Maperley is a Govt. supplier already, many govt. suppliers are ultimately owned by foreign companies. For example, Fujitsu, EDS, IBM are all much more likely have access to NIR data in the future as they are likely to be in the running for the contracts and are all foreign owned. Attacking Maperley because they are foreign owned does not seem to add much to the argument against ID cards.

It seems similar to attacking privatisation in the NHS; without the private sector there would be very few advances in drug treatment as it takes the world market to recoup the costs of development.

I think it's more to do with Mapeley's HMRC deal than the fact that Mapeley are foreign-owned. You'd be pushed not to find any irony in the fact that the Treasury sold public assets at a knock-down price to a company that pays no UK tax.

It's by no means a central pillar in the argument aginst ID cards, as you say, but it is an example of the contempt with which this government treats its taxpayers, and - ultimately - the electorate.

Whilst at the same time closing off what it claims to be 'tax loopholes', thus preventing UK companies competing on a level playing field.

Thanks for your point realist. Firstly, I'll just agree to disagree with you about NHS privatisation, so we don't go OT (let's just get rid of ID cards without getting into side-arguments).

I'm not pointing out foreign ownership as an issue, but ownership by anyone who evades UK corporation tax. Mapeley could well be wholly-owned by UK nationals through their offshore golem: the point would still remain that it's offensively unjust to ask people to pay large amounts of money in the name of national interest and national security, only for that money to then be squirelled offshore by people powerful enough and rich enough to avoid paying the taxes that we do.

It's a rational point, about the enormous costs of this scheme, which could be offset by tax revenues on all the extra economic activity it entails (processing staff, import/manufacture of biometric machinery, IT personnel, and most importantly in this case: profits). It's also an emotional point, in that the system clearly becomes not "our" system, run by British people like us in our and their interests, but clearly a system run by "them" - people who blithely ignore the rules we have to live by, while we're bombarded with propaganda about the guy next to you in the pub and how he's probably an illegal worker/pirate DVD-presser/terrorist/six-headed child-abuser from Mars with tentacles.

I'm certainly going to use this argument on the street. My first reaction to this news was "no way - how can they? Can they be that politically moronic? Do they think we're complete idiots?".

On foreign ownership, I personally believe that a system of such national importance as this should not be foreign-owned. But you make the very realistic point that it would be hard to find any large supplier of this kind of system who was "pure" in this respect.

Not really, since it will be paid for either directly from tax revenues or by fees from the consumer diverted from other economic activity (effectively off-the-books taxation). If in general government programmes were even partially paid for by their magically generating extra taxble wealth, then the more government we had the lower tax rates would be. This is clearly not the case empirically.

Government spending doesn't increase tax revenues; though some argue it stimulates other economic activity, they can only make that case plausibly for short-term borrowing that engages 'spare' capacity.

Well, once it is up and running there will be many computer systems linked in to it and lets just say one such computer was sitting in a country with no laws, no international treaties or anything of the kind. How safe would your personal data be then?