New ePassport chip short on warranty

Biometric microchips embedded into new ePassports have only two-year warranties despite the ten-year lifespan of the documents, a National Audit Office (NAO) report said.

The chip technology is so new there's no way of knowing how long the chips will last, the report said. While it has been tested, the long-term durability is ultimately unproven, leading manufacturer NXP Semiconductors to offer the 24 month warranty.

Should the chip stop working, the passport is still valid, however. According to the NAO report, "an ePassport remains a valid travel document even if the electronic chip fails". Travellers would then be issued with a letter telling them to renew their passport.

A Home Office spokesperson said that passports with a faulty chip will be replaced without charge, but added that the government is "very confident" that the chips will last the ten-year lifespan of passports.

The NAO also found fault with the readers, which currently take about eight seconds to process the chip. It's unknown how the readers will function in high-volume situations - such as a typical day at Heathrow.

Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office, said in a statement: "The full security benefits of ePassports will not be realised until UK border control readers are fully upgraded, and it is only then that we will know the impact of this new technology on travellers."

New international standards - led by tougher US visa requirements - meant the UK needed to upgrade the travel documents by October 2006. Some three million ePassports have already been issued.

While the total set-up costs for the project are expected to come in £2 million under the £63 million budget, there is the possibility of increased costs if the travel documents need to be replaced sooner than every ten years.

On possible solution is to reduce the lifespan of a UK passport. The report notes that the International Civil Aviation Organisation recommends such chip-embedded passports should only have a validity of five years - a time frame more inline with the lifespan of similar devices, such as smartcards. The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) decided to keep the replacement cycle at ten years, the report said, "because it believed that increasing the frequency of passport replacement would impose an undue fee burden on the public and put pressure on production processes."

The Home Office noted that other major passport issuing countries - the US, Germany and Japan - have all decided to stay with a ten-year life time.

The NAO also criticised the Identity and Passport Service's use of full-time consultants on the project. Although it praised the successful completion of the upgrade, the NAO said using external experts risks the loss of knowledge for follow-up projects, such as next-generation ePassports or identity cards.

"To ensure future projects deliver value for money, the Identity and Passport Service should aim to improve its engagement with other parts of government, and develop greater in-house expertise to reduce its reliance on external consultants," Bourn said.

As well, £3 million of the £4.9 million spent on consultants went to non-technical areas, such as project managers. The NAO said £3.5 million could be saved over five years by using in-house staff instead of external consultants.

IPS representatives will appear before a Public Accounts Committee meeting to discuss the project on February 27th.

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