Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 283CostThe government’s proposals will involve approximately 60,000 person-years forpersonal interviews, document handling, checking procedures and management forregistration of the entire population.Using automated techniques and streamlined administration, the alternative systemwould involve perhaps one eighth of this workload. The kiosks and TTP backups willpartially erode these savings, but these facilities will allow a citizen driven interfacewith the system, thus reducing the requirement for ongoing administrative, data inputand support staff.The absence of personal data held by the government will eliminate the need for a legalrequirement on individuals to constantly update their file held in a central register. Thiselement alone will produce a saving of between £1 billion and £3 billion over the rolloutperiod. The automated registration process will save at least as much again.The technologies discussed in this proposal are mostly available as ‘off-the-shelf’software, hardware, and identification standards. ‘Federated Identity’ schemes such asthis are in widespread commercial use, and we anticipate that they can be costeffectivelyscaled to cover the entire UK population. In the interest of independence wehave not published the alignment of such schemes with our proposed method, but weencourage providers of these mechanisms to describe how their technologies will fulfilthe requirements of our proposal.A comprehensive costing of the alternative model will be produced later in 2005,though it is anticipated that the scheme will involve costs that are substantially less thanthose imposed by the current model.