Mr. Barry Lowry:

In sketching out how this might work in Ireland we used a concept entirely owned by the Government known as the digital postbox. This is the system that is used in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and a few of the forward-thinking European countries, which is very appealing because it supports what you might do on the phone. In terms of how the digital postbox will work as it becomes more established if, for example, the RSA makes the driving licence available in the digital postbox you can get it transferred there. That digital postbox is entirely personal, it is safe because it is in the cloud and it would be accessed using a MyGovID account. A person could choose to download a credential from a personal digital postbox to his or her phone for a specific purpose. In terms of what we might also do - we have received some feedback on this which the public might be interested in hearing - a person will be able to choose to get his or her motor insurance certificate from, say, Aviva in a version that can be also stored in a his or her digital postbox, but it would mean the insurance provider would not know anything on that digital postbox other than what the person is required by law to reveal to it. There are obligations with regard to a driving record and so on about which a person must tell his or her insurance company, but it would not know anything more than it is entitled to know through the basis of insuring his or her car. As such, the person is controlling the access to his or her data and also the privacy of his or her data. In the case of a phone change, the person can delete everything from the old phone but the information is still safe in the digital postbox and it can be downloaded onto the new phone. That is one model in terms of how we see this might work. We are interested in the Commission's views, and those of member states, on how they might see it working. I am sure we can come up with something that is workable on a pan-European basis. That is really important. One of the things that frustrates people when they travel is that the rules are different in every country. Hiring a car can be so frustrating when it should not be.