Opinion: Like it or not, here come ID cards

The latest attempt to introduce a national ID card in the UK is as flawed as previous attempts, says Simon Moores. Yet it appears the government is pushing ahead with the plan regardless.

When the UK government, under previous Home Secretary David Blunkett, first attempted to place its proposal for its ID card legislation before parliament, I thought that the many technical, fiscal and civil liberties objections presented a sound platform for its rejection.

At no time, for example, did government risk debating its plans on any of the platforms offered outside parliament. In one example a year ago, at the London School of Economics (LSE), nobody from the Home Office appeared to discuss the issues with parliamentary leaders, legal and government groups and leading figures in the privacy and identity space.

At that meeting, I wrote: "Never have I seen a pillar of government policy look so demonstrably fragile and flawed. Neatly dissected by the opening arguments of the Shadow Home Secretary and then buried alive by the experts who followed, we were offered little or no reason to believe that an identity card would be proportionate, cost effective or even capable of addressing the problems surrounding terrorism or illegal immigration."

Twelve months further on to the day and Home Secretary Charles Clarke is driving the ID card bandwagon with what is in essence the same bill that was tabled before the General Election.

The LSE is about to publish research that reportedly suggests the true cost of the scheme could exceed £18bn - three times the official estimate - or as high as £300 per card holder. The plan will, by 2013, result in 44 million adults being issued a card containing personal details, stored on a central database which can be accessed by public sector organisations, without the individual's consent.

Only last week, the Home Office issued its own estimate that the cost of running the scheme, in conjunction with a new biometric passport system, would be £5.8bn over the next decade. That's an average of £93 per card holder.

Simply perfecting accuracy of biometric recognition is likely to absorb a significant proportion of the government's initial £5bn budget. Bearing in mind that the UK has the highest scrap rate of government IT projects in the G7, this sounds like another job for one of the lucky members of a small cartel of companies that dominate 51 per cent of our public sector IT projects.

Despite all this, government appears determined to bulldoze its identity card bill through a parliament that does not fully share the Prime Minister's conviction that such cards will achieve a dramatic impact on fraud, terrorism and identity theft.

Previous experience suggests a project of this size built upon leading-edge technologies is more likely to fail than to succeed but the government's touching faith in its suppliers may yet make this the single most expensive IT project of the new parliament.

Tomorrow's solution to today's identity crisis is not to be found embedded on a plastic card. It's a far greater problem which demands a much broader understanding by politicians of the context of personal identity in a rapidly widening 21st century information space.