Mr. Barry Lowry:

I will do my best. The next year is going to be a very important year for the legislation because work will continue on two fronts. First, the legislation itself will be further developed and consulted upon, and our colleagues in the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications will focus very much on that. Our main focus will be on this idea of a common toolbox. The target is that it will be signed off by September 2022, so we have just less than a year to complete the work.

I think it will be a long and arduous road. The reason I think that is that, as I said in my opening statement, some countries have put a big investment into implementing the eIDAS initiative while others held back a little bit. In regard to those countries that proceeded, eIDAS was largely built on the concept of chip and PIN, and those of us who are using online banking will remember our little card reader and how, in order to transfer money, we had to put our debit cards into the card reader, put in codes and so on. That costs a lot to implement. I know that, for example, in Hungary every citizen owns a chip and PIN reader because of the eIDAS legislation.

They are going to want to try to ensure what they have achieved so far coexists with where the new model is going. To try to get a technical approach that embraces all these is going to be difficult. Other countries, like ourselves and Austria, believed from the outset that this should have been developed using mobile phone technology. However,even then the challenge is going to be great because first of all there is the question of whether we are going to focus this on the main players, that is, the Android operating system for phones, which is Google-oriented, and then of course the Apple operating system as well. Europe is a little reticent to do that because it is giving the two American giants a big say in how the European digital passport will work, so all that must be negotiated.

Finally, the whole point of this is to be inclusive. Some of the difficulty with apps, as members are probably aware, is around people with older phones, less advanced phones or the newer Chinese phones which are emerging and are cheaper but do not meet the same standards. How we actually get apps that work in the same way in every single phone is going to be a big challenge. It might well be we will look at different models for how we do this, to make it easier. For example, the digital Covid certificate is very light-touch. All the processing is done by states in their own infrastructure and what the user gets out of it is simply a credential which is easily read by any phone with a camera on it. It may well be we will look at options like that as well, but all of that is still to be decided.