Tracker reveals status of coalition's pledges

A spreadsheet listing the pledges made by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives shows that the coalition has missed its 100 day deadline to scrap the identity card scheme and National Identity Register (NIR). The bill is currently moving through the House of Lords, and the physical destruction of computers and storage is under way. Its pledge to enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components is also overdue. The Cabinet Office draft structural reform plan gave an August 2010 deadline for publishing guidance on this. However, the department's business plan 2011-15 notes that this is overdue. The tracker, which references departmental business plans or structural reform plans to identify the progress of the pledges, discloses that the Cabinet Office is also behind in its plans to regularly publish performance details of all ICT projects worth more than £1m - September was the original date set. Other pledges that are listed as being in progress and due to be delivered in the near future include the regulation of CCTV, which will be introduced in the Freedom Bill in February 2011; the promotion of small business procurement by introducing an aspiration that 25% of government deals should be awarded to SMEs; and the adoption of protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database. The status of the government's promise to end the storage of internet and email records without good reason has been labelled as "wait and see" by The Guardian . The Home Office said that it will publish proposals next month, but has stated that implementation or legislation may not follow until June 2015. One pledge that has been kept and delivered on time is the scrapping of next generation biometric passports. Home secretary Theresa May halted work on biometric passports earlier this year, and a new type of passport was issued in October.