ID Cards: Scandalous as Well as Idiotic

This is outrageous:

A Conservative government would have to compensate suppliers of the National Identity Scheme for lost profits as well as costs if it cancelled the project.

"To guarantee these payments knowing that a future Conservative government has already said it will scrap ID cards is improper and quite extraordinary," shadow home secretary David Davis MP told the Financial Times on 24 May 2008, citing the convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent one.

Davis wrote to the potential suppliers of the scheme in February, giving formal notice that the Tories would cancel the scheme if elected.

The Home Office told GC News that the contracts include break clauses, which if exercised would mean the government paying costs and an element of lost profits. "It's based on how far the contract has got and various other factors," a spokesperson said, adding that these were standard contractual arrangements following Office of Government Commerce guidelines.

The spokesperson added that "nothing has been created bespoke" to deal with the Conservatives' intentions, and that the figures involved in cancellation are commercially confidential.

In other words, the UK government is trying to use a kind of financial blackmail to keep its idiotic projects going: continue or cough up. And to add insult to injury, it cloaks its activities in secrecy. What a morally corrupt bunch.