"primary purpose of the cards was still not clear"

Not true at all. The primary purpose of ID cards is the transfer of billions of pounds out of the pockets of the people and into the pockets of "the usual suspects" within the IT industry.

There can be no other explanation for the billions of pounds wasted on failed government computer projects. No entity can be so bad at learning the simple lesson. If you don't know what you want, how can you ever decide how to build it? (This has been highlighted in every NAO report on the subject.) Cockup or conspiracy? As usual, follow the money. Why do the same few IT companies keep winning huge government IT project contracts despite all of them having a long history of failure?

One of the unspoken rules of hiring an IT consultant is that you must first have a pretty good idea of what the correct answer must look like. Otherwise, how can you judge the quality of the answer? Sadly, it seems that the government is clueless about technology and apparently believes every single word they pay so much to hear.

anyone holding their breath while Gordons Gophers rush round to give the DPA and ICO some teeth AND make it apply to Government ? No, me neither !

I predict we'll see some spin and then it will all go quiet.

This issue is not a money issue. When will the government learn that all of there projects fail, not because of budgets but because of incompetence.

IT is a very specific skill but they seem to employ idiot workers who wouldn’t be able to get a job else where, but the government have polices to retrain workers, so people move from being waste managers to head of IT projects (wouldn’t happen in the real world).

This issue is a clear indication that anyone with a computer degree would be able to solve anyone heard of RBAC - why has a junior office body got read access to every record in a system - much less the rights to copy this information to Cd / DVD backup - without raising the alarms to someone.

Anyone heard of BS7799 (British standards) ISO27001 ISO90001 come on more money will just enable you to employ more idiots.

so why are they so "despratley" needed ??

News item stated that Abrahams will not get his cash back, it will be assimilated by the Govt.

Why not at least 'spin' it in a useful direction and send it to the Info Commisioner ?

Apart from the data commission having a completely pointless set of rules which are open to interpretation, not obeying his own laws (well his predecessor at any rate) and having no teeth to get those that do stupid things like lose all the information in their possession.

It is odd he has to ask permission to go after someone.

My local liberal democrat party to uses Google mail with their legendary privacy policy so if anyone can reign in the government in stupid decisions then it would be a good idea.

Granted he can't go after the Gvt as they voted themselves out of it and think they are above it anyway.

Well there can be, but it's still not good.

I once left a supplier's project to build a govt department computer system when I asked the question, "what benefits is it supposed to deliver" and got the answer, "I think all the other dept.s have one, and they wanted one too".

Surely the primary purpose is to prevent the government from having to make another embarrasing u-turn

The whole national IT infrastructure is bizarrely twisted and corrupt - if you bid for some government project against some money-pit behemoth like EDS, expertise, competence or budget account for nothing - you could come in a 10% of their bid for an identical offering and still not have a hope. For example, VOSA recently paid over £25K for the installation (no purchase or maintenance - that was covered elsewhere) of a straightforward web server. If I offered to do exactly the same job with the same guarantees for £2,500 (still pretty steep) they wouldn't look twice.

A relative was doing some work via a well-known government-approved subcontractor. After invoicing for the work done, the contractor requested that they resubmit invoices for twice the amount and offered to split the excess.