The government has, for the first time, admitted
publicly that it cannot justify its controversial £5.4bnNational
Identity Schemein financial
terms.
The admission came from James Hall, chief executive of the
Identity & Passport Service, in a
response to
the report from the scheme's external watchdog, the Independent
Scheme Assurance Panel, published this week.
Hall said, "Many of these benefits [of the NIS] may be hard to
quantify and potentially harder to articulate in financial terms
within the scheme business case."
Computer Weekly has maintained since the scheme's inception that
the government has not made a convincing business case for the
scheme. It called then for the government to publish its Gateway
Reviews that assessed the scheme's viability. The government
fought in court to keep these details secret, even in the face
of recommendations by the Information Tribunal to publish them.
