ID Card too expensive - home office minister

There appears to be somebody in government has realise how baddly it does when comissioning IT systems. Somebody had to notice sometime, since they do go wrong every single time, and the clever chap happened to be Home Office Minister Liam Byrne.

"There are opportunities which give me optimism to think that actually there is a way of exploiting systems already in place in a way which brings down the costs quite substantially," he said.

He was speaking after Roger Smith, director of human rights group Justice, urged the government to use the current "lull" in the project to scale down the plans.

He warned that less affluent voters in particular would oppose the scheme if they were forced to pay for the cards.

He is talking about the up front fee for getting your barcode tatoo ID Card, since everybody is going to have to pay for the Database through taxation. Scaling it down will save costs, and saving money is a good thing. So why not scale it down till it is nothing more than what is really needed and scale it down to nothing at all.