The Office of Government Commerce, an Agency of Her Majesty's Treasury, has finally publish the two Stage Zero Gateway Reviews of the ID Cards programme
It has taken- 1510 days i.e. 4 years 1 month 18 days after the initial Freedom of Information Act request, which should, according to the law, and the principle of "open government" and public transparency, have taken no more than "20 working days".
The OGC has spent at least £120,000 on legal fees alone, and probably a similar amount of public money again has been spent by the Information Commissioner's Office and the Information Tribunal.
See the OGC FOIA disclosure page.
Here are the two documents, which were kept so secret, that the OGC initially refused to let even the Information Commissioner have copies of them.
Here are the documents which caused the Government to invoke the Bill of Rights 1689 against the Information Tribunal's first decision to support the Information Commissioner''s decision to permit full disclosure.
Both the information Tribunals decided to redact or censor the names of the Assessors doing the Gateway Reviews,and the names of the people who were interviewed about the project.
- Home Office ID Cards Programe Gate 0 Report June 2003 (PDF, 92KB) (N.B. the misspelling of "Programme")
- Home Office ID Cards Programme Gate 0 Report January 2004 (PDF, 91KB)
Here is some early commentary and analysis:
- Computer Weekly: Government publishes 'secret' ID card reviews
- Philip Johnson in The Telegraph: Three Line Whip blog: Secret ID card reviews published at last
- The NO2ID campaign discussion forum thread:: OGC Gateway Reviews published"
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