It appears that Trevor Phillips is in one of his making a complete arse of himself moods yet again, if this report from the Meeja Grauniad is anything to go by…

Writing in the Beeb’s in-house, Ariel, Phillps has argued for an amendment to the Race Relations Act requiring the Beeb to publish information on training, retention rates and complaints, as well as data it already provides on targets and recruitment, clearly having failed to notice that the BBC is covered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for everything except for information held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature - so he could just submit an FOIA request like everyone else and save the trouble of adding yet more unnecessary legislation to the statute books.

However, its not just information that Phillips is after, as he goes on to explain here…

The duty would make them subject to regulation by the CRE in terms of their programmes for promotion of ethnic minorities - to some extent, the balance of what they broadcast and to a large extent, what they do on training and how they treat different ethnic groups among their staff

So the CRE want to regulate the Beeb, which is supposed to be an independent and impartial public service broadcaster, in terms of programming and employment - to what end exactly?

Apparently, this one…

The BBC currently employs 10.2% of its staff from black and ethnic minorities, and 5.2% of its senior management. Targets for the end of 2007 are 12.5% and 7% respectively.

Mr Phillips said the BBC’s targets were still too low.

"It’s fine for [the BBC director of television] Jana Bennett to aim for a 10% target on screen, of characters and contributors, because that chimes with, or even exceeds, the percentage of minorities in the national audience.

"But on employment, the pool from which the BBC draws two-thirds of its staff [in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester] is one-third ethnic minority.

"Do the sums: 10.2% is way underperforming. It’s not hideous, but it’s not good."

Now hang on a minute there, Trevor, what’s all this the pool from which the BBC draws two-thirds of its staff [in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester] is one-third ethnic minority all about?

For one thing, the Beeb, being a national broadcaster, is likely to attract applicants for any number of positions from across the whole of the UK - it might be likely that applicants for admin jobs, etc. would be mainly local but for many of the technical jobs and particularly jobs in journalism, production etc. the actual pool from which the Beeb draws its employees will be the whole of the UK and maybe, even, beyond. There are plenty of people out there looking for a career of some sort in the broadcast media who will, and do, relocate to take a job at the Beeb, so on that basis alone you’re stretching the point with your one-third ethnic minority population line.

Then there’s the little matter of commuting to take into account - if one is talking about the potential ‘pool’ from which an employer might draw his employees, that pool is delimited not just by the city in which the employer is based or has a workplace but by the effective distance that potential employees are willing to commute to work. Birmingham, which of the example given is the city I know best, may have a minority population of just under 30%, but if one looks at the figures for the West Midlands Region, which one could reasonably regard as the commuter area for Birmingham, this figure drops to 11.2% - in which case 10.2% is hardly underperforming by much and if the Beeb hits its 12.5% target it’ll be overperforming by comparison with the regional statistics as a whole.

Phillips then goes on…

Mr Phillips said BBC News was in danger of failing to address its black and Asian audience because of the under-representation of ethnic minorities.

"There’s a whole panoply of rules that govern BBC journalism, all directed to one end, which is to tell the story fairly and comprehensively," he said.

"People tend to focus on that in party political terms, but actually, in modern Britain, the more serious bias is about whether huge chunks of the community are not having their voices heard or their perspectives addressed.

"Newsrooms which are monocultural are in danger of being like comedy that isn’t funny. Without cultural knowledge, you don’t ask the right questions.

"You can be the most brilliant interviewer, but if the team that’s briefing you has no idea about the influence of South Asian culture [in] west London, you can conduct interviews there in the most profound ignorance of what most matters.

"This is not about doing the job better, it’s about whether you can do the basic job at all."

Okay, Trevor. I can go for the bit about the importance of cultural understanding and sensitivity in approaching and working in minority communities, after all I’ve been doing just that on a regular basis for the last ten years or so, even though I’m white.

It’s actually not that difficult, in my experience, to work in minority communities if you have right attitude which, generally speaking, comes down to treating people with a basic degree of respect, not making assumptions and not being afraid to ask questions and let yourself be guided by the community you’re working with. You can get a long way simply by treating people as human beings and sometimes, as an ‘outsider’, you can get further in some matters than someone from the ethnic background of the community you’re working in either for practical reasons; i.e. you’re seen as being neutral and an honest broker with no particular agenda or axe to grind, or because you’re exempt from some of the cultural forces and social mores of that community and given rather more latitude than someone who they consider one of their own.

There are advantages and disadvantages that come with working inside your own community, whichever community you’re from. You have an edge in understanding the social and cultural values of your community, but some of those values may mitigate against your work, especially as a journalist, where such affiliations may lead you to compromise your objectivity out of a desire to present your community in the best possible light. You may even yourself under greater social pressure to gloss over issues as an insider than you would as someone coming from the outside, for the ‘greater good’ of your own community.

So while a monocultural newsroom is, on balance, rather limiting, it doesn’t follow automatically that employing individuals from a particular cultural background in order to match local demographics is necessarily a major improvement - it may be, it may not, depending entirely on the individuals you’re employing, their skills, knowledge and experience and how well they do the job.

However, that being said, what the law says explicitly is that discrimination in employment is permissible only where there is a genuine occupational requirement to discriminate on grounds of ethnicity, gender, disability etc. and I dubt very much that 30% of the jobs at the BBC would meet the test of there being a genuine occupational requirement for an individual from a minority community, even allowing for the usual ways in which the law is quietly circumvented - i.e. by specifying that candidates must possess one or more specific community languages - having worked with many ethnic minority voluntary organisations over the years, I’m rather an old hand at working the system, but that’s another story - and as Chair of the CRE you know that as well as I do.

So what’s the real game here, Trevor? You know as well as I do that it isn’t going to happen, not least because if there’s the remotest sign of the government caving in to this demand then both the Equal Opportunities Commission and Disability Right Commission will be wanting exactly the same type of oversight over the Beeb.

But then you know that as well, don’t you, Trevor? Because this is all just part of the turf war leading in to the creation of the Single Equality and Human Rights Commission, just a bit more jockeying for position and bigging up your own organisation in an effort to grab the biggest possible slice of the pie when all three commissions are merged together.

And that’s what pisses me off more than anything else here - you’re not on the level, you’re just playing the same old political games and it doesn’t really matter that somewhere out here in the real world there are going to Black or Asian kids with their heart’s set on a career in broadcasting who might just be naive enough to believe that you’re actually serious and putting up these idea because you’re in it for them, and not just for yourself and the status of the CRE.

That’s the real price of tokenism like this - you raise false expectations and then piss off to the next bit of game-playing without a thought for those who might have believed you were going to something for them, only for them to find that when push comes to shove, you’ve done nothing at all and never seriously intended to anyway.

Not unsurprisingly, the news that the NHS’s new electronic patient record system is running more than two years late and looks likely to cost more than three times the £6.2 billion cost that was touted at the time that the project was given the go ahead  - or was that £2.3 billion and ten times the cost as the Register noted here - has drawn a fair bit of comment and criticism.

Tim Worstall, ever with his eye on the economic picture, notes that the now £20 billion cost of the system amounts to 1.5-2% of Britain’s output for a single year, while both he and Longrider draw obvious parallels with the Government’s other massive database project, the National Identity Register, which the state claims will cost £6 billion, a figure disputed by the London School of Economics, who put its estimate of the cost of the system at around £18 billion - three times higher, yet again.

What neither have spotted, buried as it is in the FT’s report on this issue, is the real parallel between the two projects, one which doesn’t just suggest that the real costs of introducing ID cards and the NIR will be much higher than the government’s quoted figure, but also the extent to which citizens will bear the brunt of these costs.

The key statement in the FT’s article is this one:

He [Lord Warner] also admitted that the full cost of the programme was likely to be nearer £20bn than the widely quoted figure of £6.2bn. The latter figure covered only the national contracts for the systems’ basic infrastructure and software applications, he said.

Hospitals and other parts of the NHS would, however, spend billions more on training staff, buying PCs and upgrading and assimilating existing systems over the decade-long programme, Lord Warner said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The extra money did not mean the programme would cost more than expected, he said, but instead reflected the full expense of switching existing IT spending from outdated systems to the new ones.

Notice two things here; first the £6.2 billion figure quoted for the cost of the system covered only the national contracts for the systems’ basic infrastructure and software applications and not the localised costs of staff-training, purchasing and upgrading local computer systems and, seemingly, transferring existing systems and data, if it is only infrastructure and software applications included in the £6.2 billion. This last point , that of the costs of transferring and validating existing data is a rather curious one as this is by far one of the most expensive line items in the total bill for setting up such a system, particularly where records are still held primarily on paper and in handwritten form, making the transfer process a very labour intensive task and, as such, one would have expected these costs to be reflected in the figures quoted for the system.

Second, Warner goes on to say that…

the extra money did not mean the programme would cost more than expected, he said, but instead reflected the full expense of switching existing IT spending from outdated systems to the new ones

If that is the the case then not only is he admitting that the government and/or NHS have knowingly given the public a false estimate of the costs of the system, but one also has to ask the question as to whether this figure has ever been quoted in Parliament and in what context, as if it has and the Minister in question did not make it explicit that the figure given related only to part of the full cost of the system then it may well be that an apology for misleading the House will need to be made.

Regardless of whether this is the case or not, what is clear is that a false picture of the real cost of this system has been given to the public - and it appears knowingly if Warner’s remark that the extra money did not mean that the programme would cost more than expected is taken at face value.

Now, lets apply this to ID cards and the National Identity Register, which means referring to this article from The Register

The £6 billion cost of the ID cards system, like that of the £2.3 billion or £6.2 billion cost of the NHS system is based on the costs of the core ID cards system, i.e, what the government is getting for its money appears to be the NIR itself, plus all the infrastructure, kit and equipment necessary to load the NIR with data, including the controversial biometric data and issue the ID cards themselves, alongside passports.

What doesn’t appear to be included are the costs of linking and integrating other system, which will use the NIR to verify identity, into this new infrastructure - or if these costs are included then, at best, they relate to the costs of linking only a limited number of systems (CRB, Driving Licences and Immigration) to the NIR - nowhere in the government’s costings do they appear to have accounted for the costs of integrating other systems, such as Revenues and Customs, Benefits, Contributions (i.e. NI), Police National Computer, into the NIR, systems where it should be obvious to all but the most slavering of idiots such links and connection will be made. In fact, one obvious question to ask about the NHS system is whether not it has been designed, or redesigned at any stage, to enable it to link into NIR in order the verify identity - remember ID cards were touted as eventually becoming an ‘entitlement card’ for access to public services - and if so when was this done and what costs were associated with it.

It’s also worth noting that the Register article quoted Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, talking in terms of offsetting some of the costs of NIR by generating income from departments such as the CRB and DVLA, to offset the cost of ID cards to the public, in addition to generating further income from private sector users - at the very least this will mean banks, building societies, finance/mortgage companies, insurers, etc. but will likely go far beyond that in practice.

And let’s not forget that Local Government systems will also link in to NIR in order facilitate identity checks in their electronic systems; at the very least that’s Council Tax, Housing Benefit, etc without going into employment checks, social services, and so and and so forth.

It seems that few if any of the costs of linking and integrating these systems to NIR are included in the government’s quote figures - which goes a long way toward explaining why the LSE came up with a figure three time higher than the government for the cost of the system.

Who’s going to cover these costs? One way or another, we are…

Over time some the implementation costs may be offset by efficiency savings, which may mean that some of the costs of implementation are recouped, but that’s still a pretty big ‘if’ to be dealing with and the reality is that any such saving will take a considerable amount of time to work through the system and the full extent to which efficiency savings will cover these costs is highly uncertain - what typically happens with any technology based ‘product’ is that development costs are lumped into the price that users pay up-front, in order to recoup those costs as quickly as possible and only when those costs have been covered does the price then fall. Tthis is why a few years ago, for example, the cost of a desktop colour laser printer dropped from around £4,000 to less than £1,000 in the space of a year, what happened was simply that the companies making these printers reached the point where they had recouped enough of their R&D costs in sales revenue to make it worth their while dropping the price in order to stimulate market growth.

In short, if NIR is to be self-financing then one way or another we’ll be paying through the nose in the early years to cover development and implemetation costs and only when these have been covered, with the price fall, if at all.

Quite how we’ll be paying and in what for has yet to become clear. The government expects to obtain some revenue from its own departments, but that inevitably means either increased charges for NIR-linked services, like CRB checks, Driving Licences, etc, or that costs to these departments will have to be absorbed into existing budgets - meaning potential cuts in services/jobs - or covered by increase budgets, meaning increased taxation or government borrowing to offset the costs. The same basic principle applies in terms of linking local government systems to NIR, in fact more so as Council have much less scope that central government when it comes to borrowing, so unless they’re given extra money by central government to implement new systems then there’s only one place these costs are coming from and that’s Council Tax.

One should also beware of government projections on revenue from its own departments and services. The perfect example of this is the Criminal Records Bureau, which set its inital costs for Criminal Record Certificates on the assumption that part of the cost of the system would be offset by providing basic certificates which would be available to all employers, covering unspent convictions in addition to the standard and enhanced certificates required from people working in positions of trust or with children and/or vulnerable adults. The basic certificate was to be the cash cow that kept down the costs of the other two, but when it didn’t materialise - and it still hasn’t - the cost of the standard and enhanced certificates suddenly doubled, with little or no advance warning.

Then there’s the private sector who, more than anyone else, are likely to pass on any costs incurred in linking to NIR, including charges for identity verification, on to their customers and will do so more quickly as well - its a simple equation, increased costs equals reduced profits, etc…

Will an ID card actually cost £300 as the LSE suggested? No, not up front - having pinned there arguments on a fixed cost in pushing ID cards through Parliament any substantial increase in the up front cost of an ID card
would be political suicide, especially if the first cards are issued on time, which would mean their appearance within, at most, 18 months of the next general election. Could they end up costing taxpayers/citizens £300 or more once all the hidden costs are factored into the equation - very probably, which is the point the LSE were making all along.

The real lesson to be learned from this week’s revelations about the costs of the NHS system, lessons that need to applied to our thinking on ID cards, are not simply that government IT projects go overtime and overbudget, but how the government actually conceals the real cost of such systems.

I’m no economist, but like everyone else who followed the passage of the ID cards bill (as it was then) and campaigned against it throughout, I noticed how sensitive and issue price was, even amongst the many who didn’t - and probably still don’t - understand the full rage of issues that ID cards and the NIR raise for every citizen/taxpayer - and one thing I think we do need is for someone who is an economist and who understands how government finance works, to go back over the LSE’s figures, bring them up to date and then extrapolate the full costs of the system not in terms of an ID card will cost x amount but in terms of if ID cards are actually issued at the govenrment’s set price then the hidden costs in tax, council tax, cuts in services, bank charges, etc, etc, will be… giving a breakdown of approximately how these hidden costs will apply.

In today’s Indy (behind the PPV firewall as usual, dammit!) Phillip Hensher has a sorry tale to tell of dinner conversation with Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.

Rees, as he tells the story, was speaking to a senior figure at the Smithsonian Institution and having first complimented them on the Smithsonian’s contribution to the cententary celebrations of Einstein’s annus mirabilis (1905), during which he published three seminal papers, the second of which proposed the special theory of relativity, and their work in general during 2005, which had been designated the international year of physics, he moved the conversation on to note that in 2009 there would be two equally important anniversaries; the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th Anniversary of the first publication of ‘The Origin of Species’.

Naturally, for an eminent scientist, Rees was curious as to what plans the Smithsonian had in train to mark these two anniversaries and was rather perturbed to be told that the Smithsonian were having difficulty in mounting any kind of celebration at all and that it was very likely that the smithsonian would be unable to publicly mark either anniversary; not because they didn’t want to but because of difficulties in obtaining any funding to increase awareness of Darwin and his work.

As Hensher points out, this is a dinner conversation and therefore chit-chat rather than an official announcement, nevertheless one would not generally consider that a eminent scientist of Rees’ position and stature would be prone to exaggeration on such matters, so one has to take seriously the prospect that the world-renowned Smithsonian Institute, which more than any other institution in the US is charged with promoting the public understanding of science, may well find itself unable to adequately mark the anninversaries of Darwin’s birth and of the Origin of Species.

Should we be concerned with this in Britain? After all one would expect that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum will have little difficulty in securing funding for an appropriate celebration of Darwin and his contribution to our understanding of evolution.

Well, yes, I think we should. Not only would a failure to mark these anniversaries damage the credilbility of one of world’s great scientific institutions, but to allow a situation to develop in which the Smithsonian finds itself unable to celebrate Darwin and his work would be an appalling capitulation to the superstition and mummery of creationism and its bastard progeny, so-called ‘intelligent design’ theory, one which clearly demonstrates the real agenda of ID’s supporters, which is not about having a rational public debate - a debate that ID and its supporters would certainly lose - but about the wholesale suppression of Darwinian ideas.

Disturbing as the idea of a major institution finding itself unable to mark Darwin’s anniversary might be, towards the end of his article, Hensher alludes to an even more worrying prospect, that the Smtihsonian may be funded to commemorate Darwin but only on condition that such an event must be ‘balanced’ by an ‘explanation’ of creationism/ID, treating it a legitimate alternative to evolution - no credible scientific institution could, of course, accept such a condition, which is precisely what would make it so attractive to ID’s supporters as, faced with such conditions, the Smithsonian would surely choose to have no celebration than one debased by theological pseudoscience.

There is categorically no place in science for creationism or intelligent design nor should either of the latter be ‘debated’ or discussed in a science classroom in anything other than the context of demonstrating how superstition has been superceded by rational inquiry and scientific method - if such ideas are to be discussed in the classroom, as seems to be the case as the new GCSE biology syllabus requires that:

pupils should be able to "explain that the fossil record has been interpreted differently over time (eg creationist interpretation)

Any such discussions should place creationism/ID entirely in its proper context, alongside such beliefs as that which held that the earth was flat, that the universe revolved around the earth and that sperm cells were, in fact, homunculi - and backed up by a strict marking regime that treats any effort by a pupil to cite religious texts as scientific authorities or to suggest that creationism/ID is either a valid scientific theory or, worse still, true, as an automatic zero mark on the question. Similarly, if creationism/ID is to be dealt with in science in any way, it should not be confined merely to the realm of the biological sciences, but should be dealt with across the board, not least in Physics, where the best of efforts of its supporters have still failed to deal with obvious problems in their ‘theory’ such as that of creation ex nihilo, thermodynamics, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle - how does one ‘design’ anything at the most basic level when one cannot simultaneously determine both the position and momentum of sub atomic particles and, worse still, the better the position is known, the less well known its momentum is? Only by resorting to superstitious belief in a non-corporeal supreme intelligence that exists outside the realms of physics, he existance of which - or otherwise - is a fundamentally unscientific matter.

In short, the sole purpose of allowing discussion of creationism/ID in a science classroom must be to explain precisely why neither is a scientific theory at all, a purpose for which both are ideally suited, even if this is not made explicit in the requirement of the GCSE syllabus as it should be.

I’ve drifted a little, for good reason, but getting back to the original point, it is important that we support any efforts by the Smithsonian to mark the Darwin anniversaries in 2009 in true scientific fashion, which means in the absence of any discussion of creationism/ID that does not make it explicit that neither can be considered a scientific theory, much as any classroom debate on the subject arising out of the new GCSE biology syllabus should make the very same point.

The job of scientific institutions, and of science teachers, is to debunk superstition, not support it.