Lib Dems slam ID Cards costs
On Thursday the Liberal Democrats also severely criticised the estimated government spend on its controversial ID Cards scheme, claiming the projected costs had risen by £640m since last October. The Liberals compared two reports into the estimated costs of the scheme -- one published in October, the second published on Thursday.
The Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary, Nick Clegg, said that the second report not only showed that costs for the scheme were "spiralling out of control", but that the Government had deliberately broken the law in keeping the report under wraps until other news smothered it -- in this case Prime Minister Tony Blair's announcement of his resignation.
Section 37 of The Identity Cards Act says that a report on the costs of ID Cards must be put before Parliament every six months. However, the Home Office missed the statutory deadline, which would have seen the report published on 9 April.
Clegg said:
"It is bad enough that the Government seeks to bury bad news behind the camouflage of Tony Blair's announcement.
"Breaking the law to do so breaks new ground even for Tony Blair’s Labour Party."
"To add insult to injury, the statement itself is a laughable cocktail of statistical sophistry and contradictory claims."
"But beyond the smoke and mirrors, one simple statistic remains: the total cost of the ID card project by the Government’s own admission has gone up by £640m since October. The costs are now spiralling out of control. On the grounds of expense alone, the Government should do us all a favour and abandon this great white elephant before it is too late."
However, the Home Office denied the Liberal Democrat claims.
The Home Office said that the £640m claim was incorrect as the Liberal Democrats had compared the figures in Table 4 of the first report to Table 2 of the second, and that these covered different periods with different pricings. Table 3 allowed a like-for-like comparison, said the Home Office, which showed an increase of £400m over ten years, of which £120m was specifically ID-cards related.
A Home Office spokesman said:
"The costs report published [on Thursday] shows an actual increase of £40m per annum over ten years - of which 70 per cent will in any case be spent on passports. As the report sets out, the updated figures take into account extra staff to boost counter-fraud measures as the scheme is implemented."
The Home Office said that the scheme will be funded through fee income, at a cost of £5.7bn to individuals and businesses over the ten year period.
The Home Office denied that it had deliberately delayed publishing the report until Blair's resignation announcement, and said that Parliament had been in recess on 9 April.
"We put the report out the next possible time we could," said a Home Office spokesperson. "The latest report was a few weeks late in being published. We will not confirm or deny breaking the law."
Parliament was in Easter recess from 29 March to the 16 April.
