UK Gov claims only £2.2m was wasted on its Porn pass project

[Richh]

Very good comments from Stevie Lee above.

And if you want to talk about wasting public money on cancelled projects, it doesn't get much worse than the £9.8billion diddled up the wall on the utterly unfit for purpose NHS National Programme for IT, £4.8billion on the National Identity Register and its associated ID card wheeze, and around £4.5billion on the Nimrod MRA4 anti-submarine warfare aircraft.

Compared to all of that, wasting just a couple of million quid is peanuts.

[Gentle Viking]

Politics, the job where wasting money are a hallmark.
In Denmark they would probably have spent 2 billion, and only reached to where the English are now in 3-4 years time.

[Mr_Jon]

Never mind eyes, if I read it out for you here, and you're in Lancashire, your ears will need to blooming amazing.

they compensate

[AGTDenton]

How this ever went beyond the whiteboard or piece of paper it was drafted on boggles the mind

[pp05]

Firms always see government as easy money.

Surprised we still don't have a workable ID system to thwart identity theft and cut down digital crime.

[Lanky123]

Frankly, I'm calling BS, or at the very least 'creative accounting' on the £2.2m figure. A government project that went on for 4 - 5 years only cost enough to employ (at a guess, including London office space etc.) half a dozen people over that time?

Development costs from 2015-2016 were met through existing DCMS headcount resources.

This sentence in particular suggests that government staffing costs have been hidden under another column and the £2.2m only refers to costs that were outsourced.

[ik9000]

Firms always see government as easy money.

Surprised we still don't have a workable ID system to thwart identity theft and cut down digital crime.

But it doesn't. Other countries with ID systems still have ID theft etc. It just makes your life so so much harder to keep private and much harder to put back together when someone does hack you and defraud you. When one thing is deemed acceptable proof of ID and it is compromised you are screwed. Ergo, don't bother, and give people the privacy benefits that not having it provides.

[Zak33]

I think the £2.2m was just for the Film Classification boys and girls..

"Since 2016, the government has spent approximately £2.2million through a contractual agreement with the British Board for Film Classification to implement age verification for online pornography."

I reckon they spend at least another tenner on a VPN to see if the grand kids were right.. and they were.