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ID cards - now the lunacy is unleashed

Posted on March 31, 2006
Filed Under UK National Database and ID Card |

Great article over at BlairWatch today on just how competent the National Identity Register Database and ‘Identification Gulags’ will have to be (link). Some choice numbers from the article.

We’re looking at a system workload in the first year of ten times the long term load. In a new system set up by a Government IT contractor, paying the kind of wages for operating the kind of systems that have led to such high morale and efficiency in organisations like the CSA that’s a hell of a task. This is all supposed to kick off and be working at that rate in 2008. Assuming December 2008 (and December is a really bad month to launch new IT kit for myriad reasons) that’s 32 months away.

Let’s examine what 7 million NIR entries per year looks like:

Days in a year - 365 (ok, I know 2008 is a leap year!)
Weekends - 104 days
Weekdays - 261 days

Public Holidays: usually 8 days a year or so including time off around Christmas

Working days for NIR per year - 261-8 = 253

Registration centres : 70

Number of registrations per year per centre : 7m/70 = 100,000

Per centre per day : 100,000/253 = approximately 400

Working hours of centre - well, since you’re forcing people to come along you can’t make it the middle of the night, so say 9 to 5 inclusive - 8 hours per day (or 8*253 = 2024 hours per year)

So adding it all up, from NIR Day 1 for ten years you’ve got to keep processing people at the rate of 50 per hour at every centre, or one every 72 seconds, each of whom requires a scan of the whole central NIR to avoid multiple registrations, so the database has to be up and accessible every minute of the day to avoid delay.