Official: Identity Cards project will fail

12.30.55pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 11th Jul 2006

Tony Blair's expensive pet ID card project is doomed to failure

Senior figures in the IT industry have long doubted the Government's ID card project, but leaked emails now show that even the civil servants at the heart of the project doubt that the project can work. The Sunday Times on the 9th July reported that one senior civil servant said "I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail".

In recent months, we have seen the Government's own Information Commissioner warn that the core database is "unwarranted and obtrusive".

The Home Office made claims about the level of ID fraud as a key reason for ID cards, only to see their claims debunked with a matter of days.

And, all the time, the cost of the project continues to rise.

Respected IT Industry online publication Silicon.com concludes that "ID cards have been revealed to be an all-but-undeliverable technology and lack a useful purpose. The government should put the whole project on hold to rethink the justification and the IT plans underpinning it before we have another huge IT project failure on our hands."

Councillor Richard Atkins, Leader of the LibDem group on Ipswich Borough Council, who works in IT, said "the Liberal Democrats have opposed this expensive scheme all along but Labour has ignored all sensible advice and seems determined to have yet another expensive IT failure on its hands. Millions have already been spent, millions that could have been spent on policing which would have a far greater effect on crime than this plastic poll tax. Now that even Tony Blair's project managers realise this cannot work, it's time for Labour to stop wasting money, before the millions become billions!"