Welcome to the Home Office Watch blog, a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office and Ministry of Justice compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team.

Are the police going to get the power to stop and question people - on pain of a £5,000 fine - or not?

First there was the leak - the government was to extend powers currently only held in Northern Ireland, for the police to stop and question anyone without the crucial safeguard of reasonable suspicion.

But fortuitously, there’s a Labour deputy leadership election going on and the candidates are trying to out-do each other on sounding, at turns, like a socialist and like a liberal.

So Peter Hain pops up to defend our liberty (and his campaign) and says it’s a bad idea. So did Nick Clegg, by the way, and he’s not even in the running.

Someone at the Home Office then briefed the Guardian that they had “dropped” the plans.

But in his statement to the Commons John Reid said

Consideration [of stop and question] is at a very early stage and is currently subject to a process of internal government consultation and we will report the outcome of that in due course.

Is that “dropped”? Or is that “put on the back burner until we need to sound tough on terror again”?

Incidentally, what’s especially interesting about Hain’s intervention is that the idea of extending stop and question seems to have come from the Northern Ireland office. They are getting rid of its counter-terror laws as part of the devolution deal, but wanted to keep stop and question and thought it would be less controversial if it were a UK-wide power. But just who is the Northern Ireland Secretary…?

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!