Tom Espiner reports at the ZDnet UK web site:

The government has admitted that it doesn’t yet have a definite plan for the implementation and management of its ID card scheme, despite having spent £46.4m on the scheme to the end of May this year.

On Thursday, Home Office has promised to published a detailed, definite Identity Management Strategy within weeks. No final details of that strategy could be given, as it’s still in the process of being formulated.

“We will bring forward a clear plan in the coming weeks,” Joan Ryan, Home Office parliamentary undersecretary of state, speaking at the Biometrics 2006 show in London.

Anti-ID-card campaigners are sceptical. Guy Herbert, general secretary of No2ID, is quoted:

“Quite what the ID Cards Unit does, nobody can work out,” said Herbert “They don’t seem to have produced anything so far.”

Industry has been frustrated by a lack of clear specifications for the scheme, according to Herbert.

“The solutions people are getting jumpy. They don’t want to leap into something that will be an unmitigated disaster, for which they’ll be ritually blamed. Look at Accenture [which recently pulled out of the Health Service NPfIT programme].”

…

“It’s very unlikely we’ll see anything in a couple of weeks. No clue has been offered about how they will do the architecture — one strongly suspects they don’t know themselves.”

This entry was posted by andrew on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 22:49 and is filed under General, Neutral, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.