Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

We sometimes ask ourselves what we are doing here. Today is a very good example of that. We debated the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill earlier, for which citizens had to wait over four years. Many people are desperately seeking pieces of legislation which have been promised, such as the adoption tracing Bill and other areas where there has been no progress. We are discussing this Bill on a Thursday afternoon. The only reason it is necessary is the appalling design of the Eircode system and the fact that it will be administered by a private entity.

The new Eircode system, which the Government seems intent on delivering, will furnish every household in Ireland with a seven digit unique identifier. This is a system quite unlike any other postcode system in use anywhere in the world. We are having this debate because of the serious privacy concerns around the idea of having a unique identifier, and this Bill is supposed to address the data protection concerns as a result of that. If the Government had not pursued the project in the first place, that would not have been necessary.

Many Deputies have asked, very validly, why the Government is doing this. Freight industry representatives told an Oireachtas joint committee in November 2014 that as a national postcode Eircode lacks vision, imagination, ambition and, most of all, practicality. They said it was of no use to them and that there was no logic to it, and described it as being like another Irish Water. An Post has said it will continue to deliver without Eircode. The chairman of the Irish Fire and Emergency Services Association has said that the codes may be catastrophic in terms of sending emergency services to the wrong location.

If it is not compulsory to use the codes, if the emergency services are not enthusiastic about them and the kinds of business the codes are supposed to make life easier for do not want them, why are we doing it? This is costing €27 million for a private multinational company, Capita, to implement. Many schools, individuals and projects would desperately want and need €27 million to engage in work or offset the difficulties resulting from the cutbacks in delivering services. I do not see where we are going with this.

There are very serious privacy concerns around the issue. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in its 2013 annual report stated as much because, as it said, it can be easily assimilated into sort of electronic device or data set which could, in turn, be used for any purpose ranging from State services to commercial exploitation, which is a major issue. The Minister and Government have said that they have engaged repeatedly with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner over their concerns, but I am not sure this Bill overcomes those concerns or issues regarding people's data and privacy.

As Deputy Colreavy said, Digital Rights Ireland has consistently said it has deep concerns about the privacy implications of Eircode. There is no doubt that one of reasons for this would inevitably be the fact that it has been handled by Capita. Let us examine this, because it is part of this Government's overall wedding to privatisation and outsourced companies. Capita is a large company with an annual turnover of just under €5 billion last year. It is not a charity. The Eircode system will be run with the same type of profit-making efficiency under which these companies operate.

The public will end up paying €27 million to a massive multinational conglomerate to design a postcode system that has been roundly criticised by everybody and one we do not have to use in the first place. One could not make this lunacy up.

Small businesses, if they want to use it, will have to pay. There have been many reassurances that the amount they have to pay will not be much. I will put that back to the Minister in two ways. First, €180 per ten users per year for access just to addresses - not the longitudinal or latitudinal information - is not cheap for simple database access. Second, what assurances do we have that these prices will not go up? The Minister does not control Capita. What obligation is there under this system to make it cheap and accessible to users, not to mind the fact that ordinary citizens can look up no more than 15 Eircodes per day before they will have to start paying for access? As we do not have any real guarantees around pricing, then it is possible that Eircodes will give an advantage to large businesses and so forth.

One of the significant problems with this is the issue of the Eircodes being proprietary, which is absolute lunacy and against all best practice. At the end of the ten-year contract, the State will presumably have to buy back the database of addresses or put it out to tender to another company. Nobody but Capita can scrutinise, use or build on the database it has built to improve it and make more efficient. Any changeover at the end of the contract will be difficult, as the next contract holder will have to spend a large amount of money to get it working up to speed.

Accordingly, why is this database not an open source, which is the norm in these cases? Open-source software is robust, popular and more transparent. Why are we implementing a brand new system using proprietary software?

The company in charge of this system, Capita, is well-known in Britain as a byword for inefficiency. The satirical magazine Private Eyechristened the company “Crapita” as a result of its appalling work, yet we are giving €27 million of taxpayers’ money to it. For example, the Vale of White Horse District Council in Oxfordshire outsourced its finance function to Capita at a cost of £9.1 million. In the ensuing chaos, staff did not get paid, councillors did not get their expenses reimbursed, and the council was threatened with having its electricity cut off. Capita developed Birmingham City Council’s website but the delivery was three years late and more than 300% over budget. Capita was responsible for the disastrous Criminal Records Bureau, which assigned criminal records to thousands of people who had never had them in the first place. It also overran the budget by £150 million. The UK education Minister claimed it was responsible for schools not opening because they were not able to vet teachers properly. When it took over Lambeth’s housing benefit section in a ten-year contract, after four years there was a backlog of 55,000 claims, with up to 100 people made homeless by the company’s failure to process their claims on time.

Seriously, why are we here today looking at the contract to facilitate this private company when we already have an open postcode system? It is a waste of money and time. There are far better projects to pursue with €27 million than handing it over to a private multinational company with a record like this.

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