The Home Office is treading on shaky ground with its admission that it will not ‘rigorously test’ the IT behind the identity cards scheme before going live.

There are too many examples where, to meet deadlines that are often politically imposed, testing has been bypassed or shortened on government IT projects.

The Tax Credits fiasco in 2003 was down to the immovable target of a political policy that had to be introduced for a new tax year. Corners were cut and testing was far from thorough.

And just last week, the National Audit Office revealed that IT problems that delayed farming subsidies worth more than £1bn happened because the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) ‘did not have time to test the system as a whole’.

It is easy to cry: ‘You didn’t test it? What were you thinking?’ But it is equally fair to say, as the government has, that some off-the-shelf technology will not require testing if it is well-proven elsewhere.

But in a project as unique as ID cards, there cannot be any packaged systems that will have been proved on the scale and scope required, nor with the sort of integration needed with other technology.

Some good decisions have been made in the approach to rollout of the ID scheme – the reuse of existing systems wherever possible, and an incremental approach that avoids the risks of a big bang. Given the profile of the project, there will – and should – be rigorous testing at each increment, even if not of the integrated whole.

But you can bet that the question of testing will now be raised at every stage as a direct result of the Home Office statement.

The RPA project was equally criticised for continuing despite three red-light warnings during the Gateway project review process.

So perhaps the biggest area that will be tested by the ID card scheme is government’s processes, as much if not more than its technology.

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