Every adult applying for their first passport now has to attend an interview with the Identity and Passport Service, to be questioned about their background. Stuart Watson turns the tables on IPS chief executive Sarah Rapson.
As the coalition took power last spring, it promised that its first item of legislative business would be to scrap the £4.5bn national identity card scheme. As a result Sarah Rapson (pictured above), who took over as chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) in July 2010, was immediately presented with a task that challenged part of the rationale for the organisation’s very existence.
IPS was established as an executive agency of the Home Office under the Identity Cards Act 2006. It took over the Passport Agency’s responsibilities for providing passports to British nationals, and was also given the controversial job of creating a national identity register and issuing ID cards. In 2008 the General Register Office for England and Wales became a subsidiary of IPS, which took on its role of issuing certificates for life events such as births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships.
The Identity Documents Bill became law in December 2010, and within two months the national identity register had been destroyed. Rapson says that ministers were “very pleased” with the decommissioning process – but the agency now required a new focus in the post-ID cards era.
“My job over the past 12 months or so has been to reshape and re-size the organisation. We talk now about IPS as being one organisation of two services,” says Rapson, alluding to passports and registrars. With the IPS handling both passports and the recording of key moments in people’s lives, she says, “everybody uses our services. They might not use them all the time, but we are one of the most well-known parts of government. Everybody has registered a birth or got married or got a passport. We are integral to people’s lives and that is something that our staff can rally round. We believe we do important work.”
Another major challenge lies in wait for Rapson. A replacement passport processing system is scheduled to be introduced early next year. When the Passport Agency was last faced with such a task in the summer of 1999, its failure to manage the process successfully caused delays that cost £12m and led to 500 holidaymakers missing their departure dates. The following year a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that management failed to check the new Siemens computer system properly before it was introduced, and did not make sufficient contingency plans.
“We don’t talk about that any more. We’ve moved on,” jokes Rapson; but it is clear that the lessons of 1999 have played a large role in determining the approach to next year’s system switch-over. She argues that it was the fact that the Passport Agency changed both its IT supplier and its system simultaneously that caused the problems 12 years ago.
“We have pored over the NAO report and its recommendations very studiously,” she claims. “CSC, who are our provider, have taken on the old computer system, so they have a vested interest in keeping that running and they are also managing the cut-over to the new system that they are building, so you have one supplier throughout that whole transition. We have also made sure that we have a means of regression this time. We are going to run both the systems in parallel. If there is a problem we will flip back [to the old one].”
She adds that IPS has built up a comprehensive process for managing business change over the past five years, with well-established systems and expertise in place. She talks of “managing through” the implementation process – Rapson often lapses into management-speak or jargon – and insists there are “fundamental differences in our approach; we have learnt from what happened [12 years ago]” .
Outsourcer CSC took over responsibility for managing the agency’s computer systems in 2009. The contract with its predecessor, Siemens, has been criticised after the final bill reached £365m, about four times the £80-100m cost initially quoted.
“The NAO are taking a look at that and they will make a judgement about whether there are any issues there. I would say it wasn’t an overrun,” argues Rapson. The ‘demand risk’ – the financial exposure to low levels of demand – “was taken by Siemens. We saw more demand for passports than we had predicted; if we had seen less, Siemens would have taken the hit.
“There were also a whole series of additional requirements – for example, the creation of a lost and stolen passport database, the creation of the interviewing office network, the creation of the Durham office. The majority of those things were done to maintain our position as one of the most secure [passport issuing agencies] in the world.”
Indeed, security is one of the chief considerations in a service that is always likely to be a target for criminals and terrorists seeking to steal the identities of others or to disguise their own. The new interviewing office network, for example, was established so that IPS staff can personally interview every adult applying for a first passport, reducing the opportunities for identity fraud. Nonetheless the decommissioning of the national identity register has, Rapson admits, left the agency with some security challenges.
“One of the things we are still fixing is the resilience of the IT systems,” she says. “The national identity scheme was going to bring with it a combined infrastructure for both passports and identity cards, and that would have strengthened the passport IT system. We still have to finish that work. If things had gone as the previous government wanted, that would have been completed already.”
Second-generation biometric passports, which would have included fingerprint scans and personal details, were scrapped along with identity cards. However, Rapson claims that the British passport is still one of the most secure in the world. Her pride in the ‘Scenic Britain’ passport – adorned with scenes from around the country, which also make it harder to forge – is evident: 4.5 million of these “beautiful documents” have been issued in the last year, she says.
Rapson explains that new features such as adding a second photograph, moving the biometric chip to the inside of the cover where it is more difficult to tamper with, and introducing banknote-style foil make the new-style passport very difficult to forge. She claims that there are around 50 new security features in total, most of which remain unpublicised in an attempt to catch out forgers.
Last year a report by the National Fraud Authority put the annual cost of identity fraud at over £2.7bn. While a passport is a travel document, Rapson is well aware that it is frequently used for identity purposes; and the application process has been tightened, she says, to prevent fraudulent activity. IPS works with the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and other enforcement agencies to target identity crime.
Some registrar’s functions are also a target for fraud. Identity criminals purchase birth certificates to provide the basis of a “profile” which can then be built up into a full-scale false identity. The IPS tries to get the message out that birth certificates aren’t themselves valid ID documents, she says, “and we work with local registrars if they become apprehensive that people are buying birth certificates in bulk, so that they have the confidence that they can disrupt that activity.” The IPS regularly changes its processes in order to catch out fraudsters, she adds, but it will require “a range of groups to work together to tackle the bigger issue of identity fraud.”
Another security loophole that has recently been plugged is the issuing of passports overseas. Until April it had been the responsibility of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to print passports for British nationals overseas, but the IPS has now taken over that role; while the decision about entitlement is currently still taken by the FCO, from 2013 IPS will do this too. Issuing passports from a single source will make it more difficult to obtain one fraudulently.
Rapson declares that despite occasional differences between IPS and the FCO, the process has gone smoothly because both have maintained their focus on their shared objective. She says: “We have a 200-page document that describes how we are going to manage every single aspect of this arrangement and there have been times when it has got a bit bumpy, but I have a very good working relationship with my opposite number, and on the occasions when it has got sticky we have a phone call and sort it out. If that means we are not abiding by the letter of the accord, so be it.”
Another key partner in government is the UK Border Agency (UKBA), a fellow executive agency of the Home Office. IPS produces the passport scrutinised at borders by UKBA staff, but despite the difference in size between the two organisations – UKBA employs 20,000 civil servants, IPS only 3,500 – Rapson claims the relationship between the two organisations runs deep. “There’s a lot that we do about sharing how we lead our people, sharing how we organise, sharing how we get the differentiation right between policy and operations,” she comments. “That has just been split out within the Home Office and we have done something similar with identity policy.”
IPS also works closely with the Post Office, which provides a ‘check and send’ service for passport applications. Rapson describes the relationship between the two organisations as “first rate”. She adds that applications processed through check and send show a 12 per cent reduction in errors compared to those sent directly to IPS. While IPS is planning to upgrade its online service during the next year, she expects that many people will continue to use the service provided over the Post Office’s counters.
Since the election the agency’s workforce has been reduced from 4,000 to 3,500 people. Many of those lost were working on the ID cards project, but the organisation has also undergone significant restructuring. The Newport office will no longer process applications, leading to a decline in jobs there from 300 to 150. Across the UK 39 interviewing offices have been closed: some have been re-sited at the seven regional IPS offices, while other interviews will be carried out on the premises of other public sector bodies.
With further reductions due to come from ‘natural wastage’ and an 80 per cent cut in consultants’ fees over the past year, Rapson claims that IPS is on course to deliver the £150m of annual savings required by the end of the four-year comprehensive spending review period in 2014-15. Despite the reductions IPS is still meeting its customer service targets, however. “I believe we have adjusted to what true usage [of the service] is, to get good value for money,” she says.
There is little scope for further outsourcing at IPS, as most of its processes – with the exception of the decision about whether a passport application should be granted – are already farmed out to other organisations. The Post Office checks and send applications; Teleperformance answers queries via its call centre; Steria inputs the data; Delarue prints the passports; and DX delivers them. Rapson says: “That’s the model that government wants to see and we have been like that for some time.”
The whole of Rapson’s six-year career in government has been spent at the Passport Service or IPS. She joined the civil service after working as a manager in the financial services sector for Barclays Bank and American Express. “You would be surprised at the similarities between running bank branches and running passport operations. It’s all about people, processes, secure products, customer data, customer service, the integrity and security of what you do. So actually it wasn’t that big a leap,” she claims.
“I find that I prefer being in this environment because you have to think much more about stakeholders,” she concludes. “I deal with ministers, fellow senior civil servants, other departments – and it’s not just about the bottom line and giving shareholders their value back. It’s much richer, and therefore much more of an intellectual challenge.”