ESP Systex currently serves over 60 percent of the UK transport market for concessionary travel from its unassuming headquarters in Hull, through a network of six service bureaus located in the City.

The company works alongside a number of major schemes including Translink Northern Ireland’s SmartPass; The Welsh Assembly Government’s national concession scheme, London’s Oyster Card programme and Scotland’s National Entitlement Card. More recently, ESP was appointed framework bureau services provider for the issue of some 3.5 million smartcards in time for the advent of the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme (ENCTS) on April 1st of this year. Demand has continued since April and todate over 4.5 million smartcards have been issued from the ESP bureaus or ‘Instant Issue’ smartcard systems installed at Local Authorities. In fact the NoWcard consortium of Local Authorities in the North West of England successfully issued over 350,000 ENCTS smartcards using ESP systems at their ‘mini-bureau’ based in Preston.

The ENCTS is undoubtedly the biggest driver to have emerged for smartcards in the UK thus far, overtaking the scale of the Scottish roll-out undertaken by ESP 2 years before. Managing Director Terry Dunn explains: “Scotland is perhaps the most advanced country in Europe in terms of smartcard usage for Citizen applications.

They’ve taken a somewhat different approach to the English in so far as the initial drive was to launch a citizen’s
entitlement card. A number of local authorities came together and agreed a standard for the card itself, then the
transport application was added after the standard was established. We’ve issued about a million and a half smartcards in Scotland now, firstly to elderly and disabled people, then to the young. Now we’re hoping to fill the gap in the middle. England took the opposite approach, with the ‘big bang’ of the concessionary travel scheme first, driving the need for smartcards, rather than the other way round. Now the opportunity is to make the most of the 6.5 million cards already out
there in England as a result of ENCTS and other earlier programmes, and move towards adding the Citizen applications to them. To facilitate this ESP have mapped all of the Mifare 4K smartcards that they have issued for ENCTS with the LASSeO (Local Authority Smartcard Standards e- Organisation) layout. The high percentage of Mifare 4K smartcards issued by ESP are thus already equipped to be utilised for broader Council applications.

Of course, as commercial applications are added to smartcards, the issue of security becomes even more important, but Mr Dunn is confident that his product is up to the task at hand as all sectors of the smartcards have been protected with diversified keys. Following the problems publicised earlier this year with hacking of a Dutch transport smartcard ESP took ITSO and DfT advice to secure the smartcards issued to the highest standard.

“It’s a constantly developing field,” he says. “We’re moving towards things like using NFC (Near Field Communications)
mobile phones as an alternative to smartcards in themselves, so we have to constantly stay ahead of the game to make sure customers’ details remain secure. Having said that, the smartcards we issue at the moment are a product of our high security production environment, both in terms of database management and the systems that control the production of the card itself.”

To date, most authorities are only using the smartcards for concessionary travel. Mr Dunn, however, is convinced that as people become used to the technology more and more authorities will begin to add things like library and leisure centre membership, benefit payments and so on to the range of the cards’ uses. ESP’s smartcard systems are fully ITSO compliant (in fact the company claims it has the most comprehensive ITSO

certification of any supplier currently in operation), and it is possible to simply add further applications to the existing travel cards without the need for costly replacement programmes if a council decides to expand the card’s range. ESP’s Chief Technical Officer Robin

Ellis explains: “In the past some councils have perhaps been a little slow to institute smartcard technology for their services. It’s been seen as somewhat daunting, and quite simply they haven’t really known where to start. That’s changed now though – the transport application means that the cards are already there, and it’s surely just a matter of time until they start to see the benefits of expanding their use.”

Dunn agrees, citing Bracknell Forest and Bolton as good examples of councils that have wholeheartedly embraced smartcard use. Nonetheless he concedes that take up has been slow so far, and not without its false dawns such as the now argely defunct, Smartcities scheme, and blames this on a combination of lack of funding and lack of central direction:
“The Scottish approach was to set up and manage the scheme through the Improvement Service, and smartcard rollout came under their banner so there was a more unified, regulated approach. The card came first in a nationally agreed form, and additional uses were added later,” he says. “In England, however, the onus for widening the use of the cards has very much been placed on authorities themselves, with little in the way of central regulation and direction. There’s no common standard that all councils currently adhere to, although LASSeO is seeking to address that.

“In the early schemes, many councils wanted the most highly powered and feature rich smartcards available, while
the others seemed to go for the cheapest option that would require the least investment. With no regulation in place to unify councils’ approaches, neither of these necessarily best met councils’ needs. The people who tried to go too far found they were doing too much at once, and before they knew it the technology had moved on anyway, while those who went for the cheapest option found themselves limited in what they could do with the technology they’d invested in, leading to costly upgrades at a later date.”

Mr Ellis adds: “We always used to say that the councils who invested in the most up to date technology but failed to make the most of it had ‘bought a mansion, but were living in the kitchen’. We’re convinced a building block approach is
the way forward, whereby councils can invest in technology which meets their current needs, but can also be updated further down the line without the need for costly wholesale replacement, and we always sit down with our clients at length to ensure they get the most appropriate product for their current, and future, needs while achieving best value too.” All of ESP’s products fit the bill, with the option to add leisure, sports and library services at a later date, and even to
turn the cards into an e-purse if required, as well as consolidating all the cards that citizens may currently be carrying around onto a single smartcard. The company operates throughout the UK, and the Republic of Ireland. Here its agreement to supply the Department for Regional Development in Northern Ireland with smartcards has also led to it supplying citizens in the Republic of Ireland.border towns who may frequently use transport services in the North, although Dunn is at pains to note that the two sets of citizens are kept on different databases for selfevident security reasons.

With over six million of its smartcards currently in circulation around the UK, ESP Systex is at the forefront of the drive to make the cards commonplace. While free concessionary travel has clearly created a solid argument for those over 60 and under 16 to take on a card, the challenge now, says Mr Ellis, is to catch the huge group in the middle. To this end, he hopes to see improved cooperation and infrastructure development between authorities and transport providers, including train operating companies, which will make the cards a must-have for users. After this, the ompany has plans to extend its reach to mainland Europe and the US and from there, to cheekily borrow the name of just one of the projects ESP supplies to, ….. the world is its Oyster!