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.