ID Card Centres Announced *UPDATED*
BBC is reporting the list of new passport interview centres, AKA where we're all going to be forced to trot along at our own expense and submit to officially sanctioned identity theft. What's new is the suggestion that these centres will form the 'core' of a wider enrollment network. That's an interesting development. Remember, each centre requires more staff, more equipment (particularly secure communication links), more overheads in terms of building maintenance etc. and more oversight to make sure there isn't any dodgy stuff going on. That translates to £££.
Also, if you want this lot ready to roll in 2008 you'd better start getting things in gear now, otherwise you'll still have 69 centres in 2008 when you explode from a standing start into doing 7m enrollments per year, by the current timetable. Contracts, particularly PFI contracts (which is presumably what this is) don't happen overnight.
They are:
Scotland:
Aberdeen
Dundee
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Inverness
Kilmarnock
Oban
Stirling
Wick
Dumfries
Galashiels
Northern England:
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Carlisle
Kendal
Middlesbrough
Newcastle
Northallerton
Northern Ireland:
Armagh
Belfast
Coleraine
Omagh
North West England:
Blackburn
Liverpool
Manchester
Yorkshire:
Hull
Leeds
Scarborough
Sheffield
York
Wales:
Wrexham
Aberystwyth
Newport
Swansea
South West Midlands:
Bristol
Cheltenham
Swindon
Midlands:
Birmingham
Derby
Leicester
Northampton
Shrewsbury
Stoke-on-Trent
Warwick
Lincoln
Boston
East Anglia:
Bury St Edmunds
Ipswich
Kings Lynn
Norwich
Peterborough
Chelmsford
South West England:
Barnstaple
Camborne
Exeter
Plymouth
St Austell
Yeovil
Southern England:
Andover
Bournemouth
Newport IOW
Portsmouth
Oxford
Reading
South East England:
Crawley
Dover
Hastings
London
Luton
Maidstone
Additionally, the problem raised a few weeks ago on here that people in the wilds will find it difficult and inconvenient to access centres will be addressed as follows:
The flaw here is that this isn't much good for taking face, iris and finger biometrics, so this secure webcam link will presumably be redundant when full biometric enrollment begins in 2008/9/10/whenever and people will have no choice but to schlep along to the nearest centre.
Going back to a previous thread, we now know that there are 69 centres, not 70. Additionally, it emerged shortly after that that the contract for finding and setting up the centres went to Mapeley, the offshore tax-avoiders who already own the offices for HMRC on a long PFI deal.
What's interesting now is the geographical distribution of centres in terms of how many people they are supposed to handle.
Scotland has a population of 5m, highly concentrated along the central belt where there are naturally centres in Edinburgh, Stirling, Dundee, Kilmarnock and Glasgow, plus the major centre of Aberdeen. However, since the population of the rest of Scotland is thinly distributed over a large area, there are also centres in five other towns for a total of 11, or 1 per 450,000 people.
Northern Ireland has a population of 1m over four centres, or 1 per 250,000 people.
Wales actually has large areas in the north and far west of the country where there are no centres, which seems strange. Otherwise there are four centres for 3m people, or 750,000 per centre.
In London there's one centre (plus several in towns ~30 miles outside) for 7m people, or, er, 1 per 7m people.
What this shows on a preliminary look is that the centres will be very different. The largest are going to have to have several times the capacity of the smallest. Even within Scotland Glasgow (pop 630,000) is going to be several times the capacity of Wick (pop 9000 plus a few tens of thousands in the Sutherland and Caithness areas).
I'll work on doing a Google Map of centre distribution, but in the mean time, I have a few questions:
1) What's the longest distance from any settlement to a centre,
2) What's the most difficult journey?
3) What's the biggest town without a centre?
Going back to the average 70 seconds per centre estimate, that was on the basis of 7m registrations per year initially across the country. Since the biggest centre, London, serves 7/60th of the population that's:
7m*7/60 registrations per year in London = 820,000 (the average centre estimate was 100,000 per year)
Per 8-hour day = 820,000 / 253 = 3250
Per hour = 3250 / 8 = 405
That's 6.75 per minute or a new registration every 9 seconds.
At 3 9s reliability (2 hours offline per year) that inconveniences 800 people annually. 2 9s it's 8000, etc. The reliability of each centre will presumably be less than the system as a whole (failure of the communication link to the centre doesn't mean the whole NIR system is down, but stops processing at the centre).
In conclusion, the busiest centres will have the highest likelihood of inconveniencing lots of people from system failures. The smallest centres will certainly inconvenience a small number of people with expensive, long trips. Either way, there's a lot of inconvenience.
UPDATE: Thanks to Morningstar who got there first last night - check it out here. Cumbria is clearly another sparsely populated area with high potential for inconvenience.
UPDATE 2: Thanks to David Chappell for pointing out silly Suffolk here putting Lincoln and Boston in the wrong places...
Anybody calculated the
Anybody calculated the Carbon Emissions associated with visits to these sites
I posted about this on my
I posted about this on my blog last night, I live in Cumbria and some of the journeys will be a bitch seeing as they have designated two centres, both on the eastern side of the county.
I checked the train times and it's 2hrs to one centre and closer to 4 hours to the other if I were to travel by train today and getting home could be a problem as well due to a lack of trains, if you miss one it's a long long walk.
Travelling by car, anything up to 2 hours depending on traffic.
Birmingham and Shrewsbury.
Birmingham and Shrewsbury. One very big, the other very small. I live more or less equidistant between Birmingham Stoke and Shrewsbury. If I was travelling by car I'd probably opt for Shrewsbury, by bus for Stoke, by train for Birmingham (depending on the time of my appointment). Or I might like to nip into the Oban office while I'm on holiday. Will people have a choice of centre and appointment time or will they be told where and when to attend?
Nice to see Yeovil in the list as they've already made a start on their biometric enrolment centres. They're called pubs.
What's this "secure webcam
What's this "secure webcam link" then? Do they post it to you? What if you live in Stornoway and don't have a computer? Is there to be a network of Channel4-style videoboxes? It all sounds a bit chewing-gum-and-string to me.
Apparently, the two largest
Apparently, the two largest towns without are:
Coventry (pop. 303,475 in 2001)
Bradford (pop. 293,717 in 2001).
That's from this document, which doesn't seem too implausible.
For those who can't get to
For those who can't get to the centres I guess a good solution would be to have the secure booth in a local council building. To be honest it wouldn't cost too much and would be very secure. An agent in the NIB would access the booth remotely over a secure IP network (VPN, secure IP come to mind) and in the booth you have the webcam and fingerprint detector. The info is then transmitted back to the nearest NIB office. Obviously, you would be able to see the agent speaking to you for that 'added' human touch, if that's possible.
A small point of geography;
A small point of geography; last time I was there Boston was south-east of Lincoln and so qualifies as East Anglia - unless you're thinking of the other one you need a visa to get to. Tricky without a passport in the first place.
For those who haven't been
For those who haven't been north of Watford, Bradford and Leeds are near as dammit co-mingled. You might as well start wondering about Croydon (pop. 330688), or Wolverhampton (pop. 239100).
Of more significance might be Brighton - smaller at pop. 247820, but a lot further away from their nearest centre (by public transport, possibly London, but locals may know better).
infowars has this indy june
infowars has this indy june 05 article on financing the thing by flogging our info to corps. Comments ?
frog we covered this story
frog we covered this story as well as the selling of ID data
No denials yet...
"A small point of geography;
"A small point of geography; last time I was there Boston was south-east of Lincoln and so qualifies as East Anglia "
As a Suffolk man, I've never counted Lincolnshire as part of East Anglia - they do speak funny up that way, bar. Arr.
The geographical groups are a bit arbitrary, though, so don't take too much notice of them. They're slightly better than the original list, though.
The most difficult journey
The most difficult journey would almost certainly be starting from the Shetland Islands. The only direct ferry to the mainland comes to Aberdeen if memory serves and that takes around 12 hours. Alternatively, you could take the ferry from Shetland to Orkney and then another ferry to Thurso and then drive to Wick. That'd take maybe 10 hours.
You could fly to Aberdeen and that'd make it a lot quicker. Not cheap though.
When I looked at the list,
When I looked at the list, at first I thought 'Warwick? That's not too bad; I work there and I live just down the road. At least I won't have to treck out to Coventry when they bring in ID cards.' Then I noticed.
For those who don't know this part of the world, Warwick is a very nice, but rather small, old town, and its picturesque, narrow, old winding streets and lack of parking make it an absolute bugger to drive in, though I bet that won't stop a lot of people from Coventry and most of the rest of Warwickshire trying to. Yes, I realise that many civil servants (possibly even ministers) have visited Warwick Castle with the kids or gone to Warwick races and not found it too difficult to park, but I bet those two places aren't too keen on you parking there if you've not bought a ticket.
Tom, I agree with you about
Tom, I agree with you about Lincolnshire not being proper East Anglia, but as for speaking funny, isn't that a case of the pot calling the kettle?
Actually, Boston is a bit of an odd choice. It's not exactly a high density population area and Lincoln, Peterborough and King's Lynn are within relatively easy reach from respective parts of it's catchment area
First cut of a map.
First cut of a map. Improvements to follow on Friday when I'm back at home.