NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD SCHEME

As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID card project immediately on our being elected to government.

I am writing to you as one of the companies involved in contracting for the project. I wanted to make it clear to you that our intention to cancel the project remains unchanged. I think it is important that the companies concerned bear this carefully in mind before committing to any long term contracts for the project, since it will not be our intention to proceed with the work if we are elected.

In addition, I wanted to draw your attention to my concerns about the nature of the contracts that are in development.

In March, the Home Secretary announced that the cancellation of two contracts for the national identity scheme, one to upgrade passport application systems, and one for a biometric database, would incur costs of £40 million.

Whilst we do not intend to scrap the programme introducing biometric passports, I wanted to make it clear that we will take an extremely sceptical view of any future contractual arrangements on ID cards that appear to have been put in place simply to tie the hands of a future Government.

In light of this, I urge you to consider very carefully your future involvement in the ID Card project.

Yours sincerely

Chris Grayling

Shadow Home Secretary ®

as it would seem that the labour party are headed for greatest election humiliation in parliamentary history …

Good riddance.

As someone who has to work for a living and can't live off daddy's trust fund, I don't relish another spell under the tories. The tories haven't changed since we voted them out last time and I can't think of a worse party to take over under a recession. We'll all be back to horse & buggy before you know it.

As someone who has to work for a living and can't live off daddy's trust fund, I don't relish another spell under the tories. The tories haven't changed since we voted them out last time and I can't think of a worse party to take over under a recession. We'll all be back to horse & buggy before you know it.

The Tories can't do any worse than Labour, and I'd rather live under a Tory government than a Labour one any day - the latter tax working people to death.

At least they know of something called "prudence" when it comes to managing public finances

That's their problem - far too much prudence resulted in decades of underinvestment in health and education and we're still trying to recover from it.

the local con's in my area are so prudent that we have had no street lighting for 3 years and no road repairs for 5 years …

no street lighting