Daniel Boffey writes in the Observer:

The police or security services supplied information to a blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms that has kept thousands of people out of work over the past three decades.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has revealed that records that could only have come from the police or MI5 have been discovered in a vast database of files held on 3,200 victims who were deemed leftwing or troublesome.

The files were collected by the Consulting Association, a clandestine organisation funded by major names in the construction industry.

Its database was seized nearly three years ago, but the extraordinary nature of the information held has only now emerged, following an employment tribunal for one of the victims, Dave Smith, a 46-year-old engineer who had a 36-page file against his name and was victimised repeatedly for highlighting safety hazards on sites, including the presence of asbestos.

David Clancy, investigations manager at the ICO, told the central London tribunal adjudicating on Smith’s claims against construction giant Carillion that “there is information on the Consulting Association files that I believe could only be supplied by the police or the security services”.

The paper reports details of another victim’s Consulting Association file:

Signal technician Steve Hedley, from East Ham, is one of those whose name was in the Consulting Association’s files. In 2004, Hedley, 43, was working on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link when his employer accused him of theft. The claim was subsequently retracted, but he was told there was no more work on site. A few weeks later he was taken on by a different company working on the project, then sacked within days without explanation. It was the start of four years without permanent employment. In what is thought to be police-sourced intelligence, he was named in the files as having been “apprehended/observed on way to demonstrate against BNP laying wreath at Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday”. The last entry in his 18-page file, which comprised mainly cuttings from the Morning Star and other leftwing publications, states that he had been elected as an RMT union organiser. Other notes describe his disapproval of new Labour, among other things.

Ian Sample writes in the Guardian:

The government must overhaul its use of chief scientific advisers to prevent departments from ignoring and sidelining evidence that affects their policies, a Lords committee says.

The committee examining the role and function of chief scientific advisers (CSAs) found that expert advice was sometimes blocked, dismissed or not sought early enough to influence the decisions they made.

The failure undermined policies across government departments, including proposals for biometric ID cards, plans for offshore windpower, the closure of the Forensic Science Service, and the ongoing funding of homeopathy by the NHS and Department of Health.

A report by the committee, chaired by Lord Krebs, says CSAs must sit on the boards of their departments, be consulted “early and throughout” policymaking, have a right of access to ministers, and crucially be required to sign-off on fresh policies.

“We’re not saying the system is broken, but it’s uneven. In some departments, CSAs have more traction than in others,” Lord Krebs told the Guardian. “Policy in many areas, and probably most, is better policy if it’s fully informed by scientific advice.”

In evidence given to the Lords science and technology committee, Paul Wiles, a former CSA at the Home Office, said he was unable to advise on the shortcomings of biometric ID cards before the technology was announced because “the first I heard about ID cards was on the Today programme”.

The report itself is available here.

Here’s Prof Wiles’ evidence concerning ID Cards (see p39):

As for the less successful [use of Science Advisers], the most obvious example of a situation where I was not in the loop – not only was I not in the loop early enough, but I was not in the loop at all – was ID cards. The first I heard about ID cards was on the Today programme. The result of that was I requested and obtained, to be fair, a meeting with the then Secretary of State. We had what I think diplomats would refer to as a “robust” conversation. My particular concern was not the fact of ID cards – whether there should be ID cards is a political decision – but what the Secretary of State had said they would deliver, given the error margins around biometrics and the technology then available to deliver those biometrics.

That Today programme interview may have been on 11th November 2003, when David Blunkett said biometric identifiers on ID cards “will make identity theft and multiple identity impossible – not nearly impossible, impossible”, a remark that The Register flagged as infeasable at the time.

The Register reports:

The government is to double the number of people required to have a biometric residence permit (BRP) to stay in the UK, raising the number to 400,000 a year.

The system is being expanded to include refugees and those given the right to live in the UK permanently. It will mean that all non-EEA (European Economic Area) nationals applying to remain in the UK for more than six months will now need the compulsory permits.

BRPs hold a person’s fingerprints and photograph on a secure chip, and can be used to confirm information on each individual’s work and benefits entitlements. From June, an online Employers’ Checking Service for BRPs will enable employers, and later in the year public authorities, to run real-time checks on whether individuals are eligible to work or access services in the UK.

Most of the 650,000 BRPs issued since their introduction in 2008 have gone to workers or students from outside the EEA wanting to stay in the UK for more than six months.

Tom Espiner writes on the ZDNet web site:

An £870,000 IT project to share driver data between the DVLA and motor insurers is floundering over who will bear the costs, according to MPs.

The Industry Access to Driver Data (IADD) project, which began in 2009, was designed to allow insurers to query DVLA records of driver licence information to decide whether to sell insurance to prospective customers, based on licensing information.

The project, which cost £870,000 between 2009 and August 2011, has run up against the buffers of cost negotiations between the government and insurers, roads minister Michael Penning told the House of Commons on Thursday.

He reports:

The data-sharing project is designed to close a “loophole” that allows people driving without a licence to take measures to avoid detection by the police, Penning said in the debate. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, used by the police to scan car number plates, shows whether a particular car is insured, and has an MOT and a registered owner. ANPR does not show whether the registered owner has a valid licence, said Penning.

Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian about the eBorders database, in the context of the Home Office’s recently-announced reorganisation of the Border Agency:

As central government has burgeoned, ministers have been content with success but find blame ever harder to accept. They respond to failure not by streamlining their departments and directing resources to the frontline, but by the opposite. They hire consultants, reorganise departments and agencies and spend billions on computers. Well-publicised fiascos over the NHS computer, the ID card computer, the passports computer, the farm payments computer and innumerable defence computers make the postwar groundnuts scandal look small beer. One report last year suggested that computer failure had wasted taxpayers £26bn since 2000. The incompetence is stupendous, yet there has been no audit, no accountability, no halt to crazy procurement.

A classic was the fate of the Home Office’s “e-Borders” computer, sold by Raytheon to a gullible Jacqui Smith as home secretary in 2007. A billion pounds was blown, scanning took up to 80% longer, and there were doubts about legality. The government “lost confidence” and axed the contract in 2010, with a £500m dispute about fees. Again, there has been no apparent audit of the loss. If this was Greece we would have Germans crawling all over us.

Computer Weekly reported in 2009 that under a third of government computers are completed to anything like the original form. Yet ministers continue to buy them. Computers are the utopian answer to the ambitions of centralising ministers. No matter that they cannot deliver the subtleties of human discretion required of public servants in the “post-digital” age.

Borders can’t be made impermeable by computer. Efficient control must rely on the judgment of frontline staff, and supervisors who can permit risk. They will not permit risk if being sacked, reorganised and second-guessed by distant ministers when things go wrong. Airport queues will just get longer.