£50k a day on consulting about what exactly?

Home Office Watch Blog has pointed me in the direction of this interesting piece on Computing.com. Computing pursued a Freedom of Information request with regard to consultancy and the new ID card system. It turns out the government has spent a whopping £53m on consultants for the national biometric identity card scheme, and continues to use 83 external contractors at a cost of nearly £50,000 per day - and counting, of course! This is more than double the £19m the estimate the government had with a view to its pre-procurement consulting. What are they doing for £50k a day!? How can this possibly represent value for money? This is before anything has even been procured as well - what will the IT companies cost them when or if it finally gets implemented.

Computer also reports that the IT industry is getting a bit fed up with all this. "-The current position is unsustainable-" said one industry source. "-The market needs to know if the scheme is going ahead, not least in the context of the government continuing to spend so heavily on consultants.-" It could yet be that they spend well in excess of £50m on a scheme that never sees the light of day. And that would be best outcome - the cost if this pointless scheme if it does go ahead (which I suspect it will) will be billions.