Officials expect to save £86m once all exit costs are met and are currently renegotiating two contracts worth £650m with companies who had agreed to deliver parts of the project.
Various reasons have been quoted for the scheme’s failure. The advantages to the holder were slowly eroded while the voluntary nature of the scheme meant that few people would pay the £30 processing fee; the fee on which the government relied to recover some of its investment.
However, what appears to have sealed the fate of the scheme was concerns by civil liberties activists regarding privacy issues and how secure the information stored would be. Who would be able to potentially gain access to the information and their reasons behind it, certainly became a concern in the minds of the public.
The fear could well be founded after all the HMRC breach is quick to come to mind. Two years after the publication of the Poynter that folloed the breach, a similar breach could occur again.
Indeed, a survey by security firm Cyber-Ark, found that 19% of businesses still use couriers for transferring large files. Alarmingly, the number using the postal service has increased from four per cent in 2008 to 11% this year.
Meanwhile, research by service-oriented architecture (SOA) provider Software AG has shown that in the UK public sector bodies are failing to keep records on inter-organisational secure data transfer procedures and costs.
The research questions were asked to local authorities and central government departments across the UK. A total of 14 organisations out of 26 were unable to provide any information at all.
The issues pertaining to secure data storage and transfer also resonate with the private sectors, and in particular the financial services sector.
While the vested interest of Cyber-Ark and Software AG is clear, the issues raised are real.