Official: Home Office can’t do its sums
The Times reports on the Home Office’s failure to provide adequate accounts. As we already know, the Home Office is rather challenged when it comes to working out how much things cost. The revelation that the Home Office would write off millions of pounds of tax payers money because they don’t know how they spent it will come as a surprise to few people.
This embarrassment further emphasises the need for the Home Office to open up its costings for the National Identity scheme to public scrutiny, as requested by the House of Lords. So far the Home Office has claimed their accounts are in order according to a KPMG audit of their costings, but oddly the full text of KPMGs report is unavailable.
Another interesting snippet of info to come out of the accounts fiasco is that the Home Office budget is £13 billion a year. This is roughly twice the Home Office’s claimed startup costs of the National Identity scheme. Since the Home Office is claiming the scheme won’t cost anyone else anything extra, one has to ask, which half of the Home Office’s current activities will be cut during the start up of the scheme? Or will this cost (which the LSE estimates to be closer to two times the Home Office annual budget) be swept under the carpet with more incompetant accounting?
February 14th, 2006 at 00:38
You refer to a claim that the Home Office has made, that their accounts are in order according to a KPMG audit of their costings. KPMG are not the Government’s auditors, the NAO are. KPMG are the consultants of choice when anything remotely complicated is dreamt up and it needs scrutinising by an informed eye. To remain the consultants of choice KPMG are not going to bite the hand that feeds them. Standard commercial business sense if you think about. This commercial fee naturally comes for a fee paid from the taxpayer’s pocket.
If you read the full NAO (National Audit Office) report available at
http://www.nao.org.uk/pn/05-06/home_office_res_account_0405.htm
it is quite damning. It wasn’t just The Times that ran that report that day, every newspaper did but there was no coverage on TV. It smells of some sort of gagging order.
To correct a £3 million pound error (cash that appears to have been lost) they had to make £946 million worth of adjustment to the accounts. As you have spotted, there was less than £13,000 million spent in total. Was there really £13,000m spent or was it £12,000m plus correcting adjustments? What’s a £billion amongst friends?
In September 2005 they thought they owed Treasury £68million the previous 31 March. By December that had become £112 million owed *by* Treasury. A swing of £180 million. Is this in the £946 million? Is it real?
In the pdf report by the National Audit Office, NAO report that they warned the Home Office of potential problems with its intended use of a new accounting package. It turned out that this package was poorly designed allowing unauthorised access to the core database exposing them to risks of fraud and error. “They are now taking steps to rectify this”.
Assuming ID cards come anywhere near fruition, will it be the same again? Those of us on the outside of the tent pissing in warning that no database can ever be secure from determined “folks” will simply have to wait for the press release or leaked document revealing that it *has* been compromised.
They have a long long way to go before they should be allowed to be entrusted with public money, never mind a database with the keys to every individual’s identity hooked up to other Government databases to cross match data.
This is staggeringly incompetent financial management.
No numbers they produce relating to ID cards should be accepted. They should be challenged on every digit for supporting calculations using the Freedom Of Information Act as much as possible.
To that end, these are web sites for areas under Home Office control that charge fees.
http://www.passport.gov.uk/general_fees_passport.asp
To buy a standard 10 year passport costs £51. To qualify you have to gather all sorts of evidence to substantiate a claim of entitlement to a UK passport which then needs countersigning by an upstanding member of society (or anybody from a preferred list of occupations).
http://www.passport.gov.uk/general_fees_breakdown.asp
This page explains how they got to the number of £51. A novel idea to form the illusion of Open Government. It just goes to show how creative accountants can be. How when adding up or even just devising a costing mechanism, did it come out at exactly £51.00 and not £50.57 or £51.43?
Meanwhile over on http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1006977150007
You can buy a multiple entry visa, valid for 10 years for £85. All you need is a non EU passport. So, £51 for a document to leave the country and £85 for one to get into the country, both lasting for 10 years.
Over on
http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/ind/en/home/applying/british_nationality/fee_changes_with_effect.html?
you can get lifetime membership of Club UK. Naturalisation for a couple costs £336 (includes two ceremonies), for a single £268 (one ceremony). Therefore the cost of the extra ceremony is £68 and with a fee of £200 for a couple that is £100 each. However if you make a solo application there is a single supplement of £100. Price of a solo application is £200. It is like buying a hotel room on the Costa del “Whatever” at peak season. Surely it should be £100 OR £200 per applicant?
An alternative to taking on UK citizenship, is simple Registration. This costs £120 plus £68 ceremony fee. Renunciation is £120 but no ceremony
Elsewhere
http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/ind/en/home/applying/general_caseworking/returning_residents.html
If you make the mistake of leaving the country for two or more years (you know what it is like. You nip down the corner shop for a packet of fags – you bump into an old school friend who is just about to catch a plane to a foreign sun spot where he has been having the time of his life – he suggests you tag along and the next thing you know the sun is on your face and you are sipping a cocktail in a bar overlooking one of the world’s oceans).
When you decide to return, you have to apply for entry clearance to be a “returning resident”. In effect you are asking for permission to “come home” even though your passport still has years left to run. The required fee is £160 and again no ceremony.
Or if you have jumped through hoops to have been given Indefinite Leave to Remain, it will also cost £160 to transfer these conditions form one passport to another. No extra work is done in verifying who you are, you have already met the conditions. It is just copying from one passport to another.
Assuming you are only here for the money
http://www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/working_in_the_uk/en/homepage/work_permits/12.html?
you need a work permit for a job in the UK and you need to stump up £153.
How do these all join up? How do they compare to the numbers being bandied about for ID cards?
You asked what the £13billion was spent on.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/annual-report-0405/
is where the accounts are stored. Even then the ridicule that is Home Office mathematics is proudly on display.
“The report is a very large file so we have split it five ways for quicker downloading”.
“Below is a list indicating that the full file is 2mb yet if you total the five smaller versions you will need to download 6mb.”
As I said earlier, staggeringly incompetent.
On pages 127 and 128 of the pdf you will see how the money is spent. The largest chunk is £5.8billion of which £5.1 billion includes a contribution to Local Authority spending of £10.5 billion. Together the Home Office and Local Authorities are spending about £11 billion on policing. A further £0.7 bn is being spent on other criminal detection related agencies. Beyond that, £2.4bn is spent on locking up the criminals (convicted and remanded into custody) and £1.3bn in other offender management schemes. Immigration accounts for a further net spend of £1.7bn after receipt of fees for passports, visas and permits.
This expenditure of circa £12.5 billion collected from 25 million working taxpayers averages £500 per head per annum.
If they want to collect £100 every 10 years from 48 million ID card holders, that is an income of £4.8 billion per year. They could increase the police force by 30% (£11bn *30%=£3.3bn) and the prison service by 50% (£2.4bn * 50%=£1.2bn) (£3.3+1.2=4.5bn) and still have cash left over for the same volume of spend. Then the fear of crime will subside greatly and this “need” for an ID card that solves all evils will no longer be required.