Once again, the government is evading scrutiny of the cost of ID cards.

They have gone to the High Court to block the publication of an Office of Government Commerce “Gateway Review” - a sort of feasibility study - completed way back in 2003 of the ID cards scheme.

Mark Oaten made a Freedom of Information request for the review back in December 2004, and the Information Commissioner eventually ruled in our favour. The OGC appealed to the Information Tribunal, who also ruled in our favour, giving the government 28 days to publish.

Those 28 days expired yesterday so… the government appealed again. Another victory for freedom of information.
See The Register for the full story.

On Tuesday I noted the revelation that court cells cost £1600 a night, just a whisper more expensive than a deluxe suite at the Ritz.

But it turns out I was duped. Humble apologies.

The £120,000 the Home Office has paid out for court cell accommodation wasn’t for the whole of this year, it was for just 20 nights back in January and February. This was admitted by the Ministry of Justice this morning.

And it paid for not 77 prisoners, but a measly 12.

That’s £10,000 a night each. And I can’t find a hotel in London that charges that much; even the capacious Prince of Wales suite at the Ritz is only £5,500. A snip!

Today we learn the Forensic Science Service forgot to upload about 26,000 DNA samples onto the national database between 1994 and 2005.

I expect they dropped them down the back of the sofa, along with those 27,000 case files on offences committed by British citizens abroad. (Is this the Home Office version of “sofa government”…?)

This mistake left nearly 200 crimes undetected. Nice one.

Only this government could have a DNA database that tracks the innocent and leaves off the guilty.

Interestingly, the Home Office announced this gem themselves. A new outburst of frankness? Well, given ministers have apparently known since January, no. Just clearing the decks of bad news in time for the new guy is my guess.

A little story we dug up - you can read it here - keeping prisoners in court cells while the prisons are too overcrowded to take them has cost more than a deluxe suite at the Ritz.

Of course, the Ritz doesn’t have quite the same level of security, though you are in for a wrestle with the doorman if you try to cross the threshold in ripped jeans…

Enough with the complaining about the delay in publishing this ID card cost report: time to complain about what it reveals.

Over the next 10 years, ID cards will cost £5.55bn. That’s up from an estimate of £5.4bn six months ago - but they also reveal today that, whoops, they got the numbers wrong in October and at that point the cost was just £4.9bn. So that’s a 13% cost increase, an extra £640m in total, pushing the total cost of an ID card for Joe Citizen to over £100.

And the icing on the cake? The Home Office has been spinning all day that the costs are really only £5.3bn. If you read the full cost report, this is the cost noted in table 3, which is something along the lines of “how much ID cards would have cost last October, if changes we’ve made to the scheme since then had been incorporated”. Also known as “a completely pointless piece of information we’ve included to make things look less bad.”

Hooray for transparent government!

To you and me, today is a big day, when the Prime Minister for the past decade announces his resignation. To the government spin-meisters, however, it’s just another good day to bury bad news.

It has just been announced in today’s parliamentary business that the ID cards cost report - which the government was legally obliged (I repeat, legally obliged) to publish 31 days ago - is to be published today.

We have come to expect cynical news management from the Labour government. Holding off an uncomfortable announcement until a busy day is just par for the course. But to actually resort to breaking the law in order to save face? That’s breaking new ground.