22 Feb 2007
The government is being accused of inflating the price of biometric passports to disguise the cost of its identity card scheme.
The issue was raised in the Commons this week by Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg after Home Office minister Liam Byrne said 70 per cent of the cost of ID cards ‘will be spent anyway on introducing biometric passports’.
Clegg is calling for a full comparative analysis of the costs of both projects, arguing the discrepancies in cost estimates give rise to ‘the suspicion that the costs of biometric passports are being artificially inflated to give an impression that the cost of the ID cards project is lower’.
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The Home Office has been saying this for years, in case you hadn't noticed. But it is simply creative accounting.
Passports are now ICAO standards compliant. Nothing more need be done. (Though it would be nice if the standards could be revised to rank security of the holder above official convenience.) The entire intrusive data-collection and interrogation programme now being introduced has no other purpose than to build the structures for, and force the majority of the population on to, the planned National Identity Management Scheme.
Of course no workings have been disclosed (and even KMPG, when called on to check the working secretly and vouch for the budget matching the plans, was only allowed to see calculations relating to 40% of the costs) but "70% of the costs anyway" looks suspiciously like the government has observed 70% of the population gets a passport over 10 years and allocated the notional costs of numbering and fingerprinting the entire population between "passports" and "stand alone ID cards" on that basis.
Posted by: Guy Herbert (General Secretary NO2ID) 23 Feb 2007
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