Home Secretary Charles Clarke - whose department is responsible for the proposed ID card - said the ID card scheme, had it been in place, would not have prevented the London bombings.

Now the minister in charge of the project itself - Tony McNulty - has played down the advantages of the scheme generally.

Tony McNulty, the minister in charge of the ID card project, admitted that ministers had been too enthusiastic in suggesting that the cards could be the answer to a host of problems such as terrorism and multimillion-pound benefit fraud.

Not only will it solve nothing it will, at best, just ‘help’ in certain, specific areas:

Mr McNulty said that the identity card scheme would help to tackle some of the problems but not overcome them. “It will help where fraud and abuse of identity is part of the equation. It will help in the development of some, but not all, strategies to combat identity fraud, serious crime and terrorism,” he said.

One thing that strikes me is that the day somebody manages to fiddle the ID card system not only will it make that person very rich but the amount of trust - and the degree of access - that one piece of plastic will afford them will mean that the fraud will be massive in scale and widespread in scope.

Anyway, I’m going to give the government 10 out of 10 for the belated honesty with which they’ve spoken on this subject of late.

But now the question that we’ve all been asking:

Why will be be spending billions of pounds on a project that will almost certainly go the way of all government IT projects - ie it will go very badly indeed - for benefits that will never be particularly outstanding and will, often, be non-existent?

What’s in it for the government?