Information and resources for suppliers

Events

Ensuring Privacy and Consent: Delivering Innovative Solutions – Call for Participants
Industry meetings – January/ February 2007
Industry meeting with IPS Chief Executive – November 2006

We will continue to use this website as a mechanism for promoting any future events and suppliers are encouraged to monitor the pages for updates.

Ensuring Privacy and Consent: Delivering Innovative Solutions – Call for Participants

Expressions of interest are invited to attend a five day sandpit to develop academic/ industry multidisciplinary research and innovation consortia from 12 to 17 November 2007. For further information visit the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). (Opens in a new window)

Industry meetings - January/ February 2007

The Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme emphasised the importance of engaging with industry leading up to the launch of procurements. As part of this and in response to feedback from the market, the Identity & Passport Service (IPS) devised a series of workshops in conjunction with the trade body ‘Intellect’.

These were held over a period of six weeks, involving a wide range of participants from different areas of expertise from over sixty firms. Workshops were organised around a number of key areas for delivery and featured presentations from IPS on current thinking and opportunities for representatives to discuss issues and how they might be addressed. Engagement of this sort is in line with best practice and IPS is grateful for the contributions from Industry and to Intellect for their support and work in facilitating such dialogue. The sessions proved very useful and produced three key outcomes for IPS:

A broadening of Industry’s understanding of approach to delivery
Confirmation of issues and approaches to be addressed
Further issues and recommendations to consider

In order to ensure equality of treatment of interested suppliers, a summary of the feedback from each workshop, which includes the material presented to attendees, has been produced by IPS and can be downloaded below.

Each session produced useful outputs and stimulated healthy debate on the challenges that both IPS and Industry need to meet. A number of important themes and considerations were raised during the workshops, which IPS recognise and will continue to place strong emphasis upon. These include:

Governance – the need to ensure that appropriate procedures and structures are in place to make decisions and set direction for the multiple, interrelated elements of the National Identity Scheme. Industry recommended that it would be beneficial for suppliers to have sight of such arrangements as far in advance as possible and offered to contribute to their development. IPS concurs with the high level of importance Industry placed in this issue and plans to factor this into existing work at the earliest appropriate point..
Integration – the need to ensure there is clear responsibility for making the different components ‘fit’ and operate. There was healthy debate around the different options available, but the key conclusion was that integration and delivery responsibility should be linked together. This was on the basis that such integrators will be better incentivised and appraised of the issues to be able to manage risks and delivery. IPS concurs with this view and has also taken on board the need to articulate fully to the market how it plans to proceed.
Integrity – ensuring there is a high level of integrity built into processes and systems to deliver success was discussed at a number of sessions. Testing and trialling, the use of standards and the investment of time and resource into getting things right at the outset were all recommended and IPS concurs with this and will continue to work on ensuring that these recommendations are factored into plans.
Uses – there were discussions during many of the sessions regarding the uses of Identity Products. One suggestion was the inclusion of the ability for digital signatures (a piece of cryptographic technology that allows an individual to electrically ‘sign’ something). It was felt that this would add a potentially significant user benefit without adding much complexity. IPS looks forward to supplier solutions of this type being put forward in the procurement process and the suggestion has been communicated to those working on design of requirements.

Feedback summary presentations:

Please note these links will open in a new browser window.

Industry meeting with IPS Chief Executive – November 2006

James Hall, Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service, attended a meeting with systems, integration and technology Industry representatives on 7 November 2006. The meeting was facilitated by the trade body ‘Intellect’ and approximately seventy people attended.

A pdf summarising James Hall’s remarks is available for those who did not attend (36KB, new window).

Get Acrobat Reader To find out more about accessible pdfs visit: Access Adobe. If you cannot read PDF format files, you can use Adobe Access Online conversion tools to get a text version.

Return to previous page

24-hour Passport Adviceline: 0300 222 0000 (see terms and conditions). Calls made to 0300 numbers from landlines and mobile phones are charged to customers at their network provider's national rate. Live operators are available to assist with your enquiry 24 hours a day.