The Government has coughed up nearly £2.5m in compensation to suppliers after it scrapped the National Identity Card programme.
In a written response to Labour MP Meg Hillier, immigration minister Damian Green said the government had paid £2.002m to Thales, £183,000 to 3M and £68,000 to Cable & Wireless in compensation for cancelling their contracts.
It has already spent £400,000 destroying the personal data collected under the programme.
The 15,000 people who took up the cards in a trial in Manchester will not receive a penny, despite calls for them to be compensated, or at least reimbursed with their £30 fee for joining the trial. Speaking on BBC One’s Rip-off Britain recently, one trial member said: “They should either give me back my money, or honour the terms of the deal. If this was any other business transaction, they would be taken to court. It is outrageous.”
The Government is paying Thales a further amount “to decommission ID card systems and securely to destroy the personal data held in these systems”. Although dated in February, the letter has only just been published online through Parliament’s library.
The report said: “We have confidence that sound processes were employed to ensure that the NIR, associated data and computer hardware were identified and destroyed in accordance with the Identity Documents Act.”
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