The true cost of ID cards
Posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 by Home Office WatchCategory: ID Cards, Uncategorized
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!
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May 10th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Oooh, what a coincidence they’ve decided to publish this information on the day Blair announces his leaving date. Good day to bury bad news anyone?