ToryDems add up bill for Labour's ID scheme
The Labour government spent just under £300m to develop the ID card and biometric passport schemes unceremoniously dumped by the ToryDems this month. The figures came in a commons answer on Monday. Conservative MP Richard Harrington asked "what recent representations she has received on the cost of the identity cards scheme?" …
I'm wondering when the cost of the passport is going to shrink?
My guess is never, or a bit later
15,000 cards for ~£300,000,000 works out around £20,000 each.
Cost £41m, raised £450k, a factor of a mere 100x out is probably Labour's idea of self financing, given the budget deficit which was always claimed to be "balanced over the economic cycle" but is down by £485bn this cycle. Maths never was their strong point.
"which at £30 a pop adds up to... £450,000"
not a bad haul, but they forgot the most important thing. When setting up a front for a criminal organisation you shouldn't spend too much money on phoney display items or it'll eat into your takings. It seems they went a bit mad and furnished the store with £300m worth of jewelery and luxury gadgets when all they really needed was a poster reading "get ur money taken here"
maybe Jacqui Smith was going to claim it back on expenses LOL.
Of course if you'd let the thing run and made it compulsory you would have got that money back and been able to spend the recouped investment on extra police. Ho hum. Back to the old fashioned way of funding public services then. VAT rise anyone?
... and it has loops for epaulettes and says "Police" on the back!
Or...
If they never spunked the £300mm on such a pointless, useless, insidious little control-freak program in the first place, there'd be no 'investment' needing to be recouped in the first place.
Just a thought.
Gotta love political spin
self-financing = built in taxation
So when are the 15,000 card holders going to be billed the remaining £19,970 each to make this scheme "self financing"
'Blue fanciers'? We say it because it irritates people when we swerve the obvious. Have you learned nothing? I suppose irritation can clog up your neural pathways a bit...
"So what exactly is it you want"
Well we want an id card so we can easily identify a UK citizen.
"Ok that's easy photo id should come out at about £30 per user"
Well I wondered if we could add some other stuff on the card, say with a smart chip?
"Yes that's easy we use them for banks so no real problem, what exactly do you want?"
Well we want a digital photo, retinal image data, finger print, DNA id, social security number, address, date of birth, ethnic origin, Police National Computer Id, HMRC Id, driving license number, bank account details, employment status, security clearance and if possible twitter id, facebook id and recent google search data.
"That may be difficult without a central database."
OK lets have a central database that draws all this data together so that we can really identify our UK citizen.
What do you think thats going to cost?
"Well lets start with a ball park of £20K per card.
There are few projects out there that can use this amount of money to deliver a product. Its a sign of monumental inefficiency, even fraud. You might be able to justify this if you were developing new technology but this isn't -- its an application that uses existing technology.
You should all go talk to Lord Erroll (an IT man at heart), who has been pointing out that it was only operational cost that the £30 fee (and the passport fee, for its really all one system) is meant to recover.
As the cool uncle, I'm always talking with my nephew about various things, and the topic of underage drinking and he showed me his latest 'fake ID'.
It turned out that it was one of these all-singing all-dancing ID cards that Labour were trying to push on us - and overage people were being paid by underage people to buy the ID card for them as a good proof of age.
So with all that news that young people found favour in these ID cards, it's true, but not for the legal and above-the-line reasons. It just goes to prove how out of touch the ex government was with society's feelings toward the matter. Well done Labour, and good riddance!
