NICOLA Sturgeon has defended soaring costs of the Scottish Government’s vaccine passport app – insisting that failing to act would have been costly.
The vaccine certification scheme, which required proof of vaccination of exemption to enter certain settings such as nightclubs, was initially estimated to cost £600,000.
But it was reported over the weekend that the actual figure for the app was £6.8 million.
Danish IT firm Netcompany was awarded a contract to develop the app in October before Deputy First Minister John Swinney confirmed the costs had increased to £1.2 million in November, before an extension to the company saw the costs double to £2.4 million.
US company Jumio was contracted to design facial recognition technology for the app but costs also increased from £3.3 million to £4.4 million.
The Scottish Government suggested that a requirements for proof of a negative Covid test as part of the domestic monitoring scheme is partly to blame for the rising costs.
Tory MSP Tess White pressed Ms Sturgeon over the soaring costs.
READ MORE: Scottish ministers reprimanded after Covid passport scheme broke data law
Speaking in Holyrood, Ms White warned that the budget has expanded by “more than ten times the originally-projected cost of £600,000”.
She added: “Can the First Minister account for how costs were allowed to balloon like this and does the Scottish Government believe that this represents value for money for the taxpayer?”
In response, Ms Sturgeon said: “I do think the decisions that we have taken to try to avoid Covid cases being even higher, the harm caused by Covid to be even greater than it has been, will show in time to have been worth that.
“Obviously we are about to have a public inquiry that will look at all of these issues and hold governments here to account and that is right and proper.”
She added: “But every time somebody has that we shouldn’t have taken a particular step, in this case vaccine passports, and avoided the costs of vaccine passports, also has to consider what the implications of that would have been in terms of higher cases potentially, in terms of more people in hospital and perhaps in terms of more people perhaps becoming seriously unwell.
“All of that has a cost as well and that is not just a financial cost.”
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