The government is being accused of inflating the price of biometric passports to disguise the cost of its identity card scheme.
The issue was raised in the Commons this week by Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg after Home Office minister Liam Byrne said 70 per cent of the cost of ID cards ‘will be spent anyway on introducing biometric passports’.
Clegg is calling for a full comparative analysis of the costs of both projects, arguing the discrepancies in cost estimates give rise to ‘the suspicion that the costs of biometric passports are being artificially inflated to give an impression that the cost of the ID cards project is lower’.
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