David Davis, Conservative Shadow Home Secretary has announced that the next Conservative government will scrap the ID card scheme immediately.
With that in mind David Davis has written to Sir Gus O'Donnell making our position clear, and also asked what provision is being made for the scheme being scrapped early, and pointing out the obligation not to waste public money.
Fantastic. Many will have noticed that I am against the scheme as I have a No2ID banner on my blog!
Also it will be interesting to see how the civil service reacts to being put on such notice.
You can read more on the Conservative party website here.
Hat tip to Iain Dale who has this here and Guido who has this here.
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2 comments:
Excellent news, indeed. Now the only problem would be if the LibDems cave in other it, after the next election, in return for a half-assed promise for PR.
As for the civil service. No-one with half a brain will want to work on a project that could be a complete waste of time. They will quickly find themselves with only those unable to get a job elsewhere and the "true believers". Most of those left will be pretty low on morale.
There could still be a lot of money wasted on this - particularly if the IT contracts are badly drafted. I wonder whether Labour would be cruel enough to put "handcuff" type clauses in - it may well be that the contractors will insist on it though if the contract could come to a sudden end. That could be very expensive [still cheaper than going ahead though].
I have my doubts though. I never thought Labour were going to go ahead with the foolish Dome, but they did. There's often a tremendous amount of momentum and institutional inertia associated with projects like this [in the private sector as well as the public sector], so cynical me wonders whether the Tories really would cancel it.
Good points Timothy. The prolems who highlight are more maybes than probable though (I hope).
I suspect the left is at a very low eb right now in many ways. We shall see how that pans out.
The most interesting bit though, was not that the Conservative party has come out against it, but that they have taken formal steps to shoot across the bows of the project.
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