By Nick Heath, 11 April 2008 17:00
NEWS
The UK's ID card scheme has helped fuel a 2,000 per cent hike in the cost of Home Office consultants - taking the bill up to £147m last year.
Home Office spending on consultants shot up from £7.6m in 1997/98 to £147m in 2006/07, a period described by shadow home secretary David Davis as the "worst period in its 200-year history".
Spending on consultants within the Identity and Passport Service, responsible for realising the ID card scheme, increased from £237,000 to £30m during the same period.
Davis told silicon.com: "The Home Office has had its worst period in its 200-year history, stumbling from crisis to crisis. Despite spending £150m last year on consultants - things are getting worse. Violent crime has doubled, immigration has tripled and police now spend more time on paper work than patrol."
Silicon.com's A to Z of ID Cards
Click on the links below to find out everything you ever needed to know about the government's ID card plans...
A is for Act
B is for Biometrics
C is for Compulsory
D is for Data privacy worries
E is for EDS
F is for Forgery
G is for Government IT
H is for Home Office
I is for Identity and Passport Service
J is for Jury
K is for Hong Kong
L is for London School of Economics
M is for Money
N is for National Identity Register
O is for Other cards
P is for Passports
Q is for Quarter
R is for Refuseniks
S is for Self-destruct
T is for Terrorist
U is for Utility bill
V is for Verification
W is for When
X is for Xenophobia
Y is for Young people
Z is for London Zoo
Home Office minister Liam Byrne defended the spending spike claiming the government was buying in specialist expertise and attributing much of it to major outsourcing contracts and IT projects.
In a written answer to parliament Byrne said: "The use of external consultants provides the department with specialist knowledge, skill, capacity and technical expertise that would not otherwise be available. The department's expenditure on these services is allocated across a wide range of firms, from small, specialist companies with niche expertise and few employees, to global multinational organisations offering a broad spectrum and substantial depth of consultancy expertise."
The £147m consultancy bill is broken down into £118m for the Home Office last year and £29m across the department's other agencies, including the Identity and Passport Service. But a Home Office spokesman said this represents less than seven per cent of the department's total expenditure on goods and services at £1.9bn.
He said: "This expenditure reflects the size and complexity of a large organisation which the Home Office and its agencies certainly are."
The government plans to start taking the first biometric details from UK citizens for its National Identity Register scheme next year but has delayed the mass roll-out of the scheme until 2015.
Comments
There are 10 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Expertise - Rubbish
If they had employed any 'experts' then we wouldn't have this nonsense of an Identity Card Scheme.
I suspect that once more the only thing this highlights is TOTAL incompetence at the Home Office.
2. Richard Davies
It doesn't matter what the government try to say in defence of such spending...if you are spending much more yet still managing to make things worse then there is definately something wrong!
Also, it makes me think how much more of the 1.9 billion is also wasted and could be saved.
3. Chris Stevens
I used to be a Civil Servant, but now I am a consultant. Why? It was made pretty clear to me early in my career that the Civil Service (Government) was unwilling to pay a fair wage for skilled personnel.
They pay low wages and attract low calibre personnel. The cost of that is they actually increase head count and have to subsequently pay for (expensive) consultants as well.
4. Ian Kilpatrick
£147M to fund consultancy on a scheme for which there is widespread disapproval or concern. This compares with no funding provided to those people and groups who who have expressed concerns ?
While not suggesting that all dissent should be funded it is anomalous that the government are funding one side of the debate in the hundreds of millions and it is left to concerned citizens groups such as no2id and Liberty, to defend our freedoms out of their own resources
5. Jeremy Wickins
The report implies two things: either;
a) They are employing good consultants at high rates of pay, then ignoring the advice; or,
b) The consultants are just giving the answers the Home Office big-wigs want to hear.
Either way, it is an unacceptable waste of money, and it is long overdue that those of us that pay for it (the tax-payers) have a proper way of indicating our displeasure.
6. anonymous
£147M? Nice work if you can get it...
7. Radical Meldrew
Why is it necessary to employ so many consultants? Have the levels of endemic incompetence become high enough to justify this massive additional expense?
The Home Office expect widespread public support on various issues…..they can't even manage their own jobs without high levels of guidance.
8. Karen Challinor
so now we know the price of a ""
9. GALLEY SLAVE#41
Why must they keep throwing our money at a lost cause?
10. Karen Challinor
GALLEY SLAVE - "Why must they keep throwing our money at a lost cause?"
because despite all our protestations they are going to bring it in
and if you don't believe that, look at the number of failed attempts to bring in longer detention for suspected terrorists, they will keep hammering away at that until the next election so don't expect them to drop the NIR & ID card scheme either