A Freedom of Information request by Computing magazine reveals:

The government has spent £53m on consultants for the national biometric identity card scheme, and continues to use 83 external contractors at a cost of nearly £50,000 per day.

The figures are more than double the value of the original £19m pre-procurement consultancy contract signed in 2004.

Read the rest here.

Automatic Number Plate recognition gets 1 in 25 read-outs wrong, the Department for Transport reveals.

We discovered last week - thanks to an inadvertent leak from the Home Office - that the whole national network of ANPR cameras will soon be linked in to the police.

So the accuracy of the cameras is pretty vital.

And while 96% is pretty good as a mark in a maths test, it’s less good when it comes to tracking car drivers’ every movement. When you consider that the cameras monitor millions of cars, 4% failure turns into thousands upon thousands of false positives.

The Public Accounts Committee impressively takes apart the government’s anti-social behaviour agenda. ASB interventions are now costing £3.4bn a year, but the government has made no effort to evaluate the effectiveness of really, any of it.

The department has no information about the effectiveness of its policies and even supplied the National Audit Office with incorrect data. Whoops.

The report  concludes:

Comparable local areas use different approaches to dealing with anti­social behaviour and there has been no comparative evaluation of the success of these approaches. Nor has there has been a comprehensive evaluation of the use and success of the different measures and powers, making it difficult for the Home Office, the Respect Task Force and those dealing with anti-social behaviour to assess what works best.

It’s worth reviewing what little evidence there is, however. This is from a sample study by the National Audit Office:

And the Respect Unit found that ASBOs can cost as much as £10,000.

OK, this is petty.

But what is up with the Border and Immigration Agency’s website?

Is the banner section a logo? Is the white line supposed to be representing Britain’s border? If so - why are there two big gaps in it? Are they trying to tell us something about the state of our border control?

I wonder if they paid anyone to design this…

Update: They didn’t. Phew.

The Times, among others, reports the news that:

The details of journeys taken by millions of motorists are to be handed to police under a government “Big Brother” plan to use road pricing technology in the fight against crime.

The proposal is to introduce new legislation to give police routine, open door access to all number plate recognition data collected by third parties - Transport for London initially, but in the long run any council or transport authority that runs these cameras.

There will be extensive debate about the merits and disadvantages of these proposals, so instead of that I thought I’d recount the more amusing story of how the story got out.

The government tabled a Written Ministerial Statement explaining about the new arrangement between TfL and the Metropolitan Police. They sent it to Hansard and to the House of Commons Library, who forwarded it to interested MPs.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to turn off “track changes”.

The statement had been written over a wholly separate internal document marked “Policy - Restricted” which set out details of:

- the plans to roll out the London scheme nationally with legislation in the autumn
- the split with the Department for Transport over the proposals
- the government’s “handling strategy” for proposals they themselves dub “Big Brother”

Good to see the department in charge of Identity Cards has such a grasp of modern technology.

Over 2000 police officers quit their jobs last year - up 60% in just three years.

Labour has achieved a great deal in terms of officer recruitment, with many more police on our streets than in 1997. But if trained officers are quitting in such large numbers, that suggests some pretty serious low morale.

The full stats are here.

Here at Home Office Watch, we wanted to give Jacqui Smith a fair chance. OK, so she might be in favour of identity cards, but hey, nobody’s perfect, and in the spirit of fairness we’ve held off since her appointment.

But this statutory instrument has brought us back into the fray.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mauritius, Montenegro, Peru and Serbia are to be added to the government’s White List, along with Gambia, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali and Sierra Leone for male applicants. That means asylum applications are assumed to be unfounded unless they can be proven otherwise. Any rejected applicants have no in-country right of appeal - so they have to go back to their country of origin (pretty dangerous if your application was valid) to lodge their appeal.

Now, it’s not for me to second guess conditions in any of these countries. But since 2004, nearly 500 people from these countries whose asylum claims were rejected have made successful appeals.  Surely that is evidence enough that claims from these countries are not all “clearly unfounded”?