£200m down the drain already!

Posted By: Pauline Maguire
Date Posted: 10/08/2009

I am writing this Councillor’s Diary to express my dismay after discovering this week that our Government has already spent more than £200m on the Identity Card Scheme.

Imagine what £200million could have paid for in Rochdale? Thousands more police officers on the streets, filling our empty town centre shops with community projects, providing much needed jobs and much, much more.

This ill-advised scheme has been a fiasco from start to finish and the Liberal Democrats have consistently been committed to ending ID cards.
Of course the £200m already spent is just a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of pounds that would be committed to this scheme by another Labour government.

Just as worrying is the government’s plan to load all the details of ID card holders onto a “National Identity Register”, which will also include all the details of anyone who has applied for a passport. 

This Labour government has shown they cannot be trusted with our private data. If allowed to proceed, the ID card scheme + National Identity Register would be the most ambitious and expensive public sector IT project ever undertaken. Time and again, this government has proven they cannot effectively manage such projects (example: NHS IT debacle)

The very reason ID Cards were conceived in the first place was to stop identity fraud, crime or terrorism and I have seen no evidence to suggest that these cards will do any of that.

It’s high time the whole barmy scheme was scrapped.