ID Cards on Trial: Flawed plans are £19bn "dog's dinner"

The government's national ID card proposals are a "dog's dinner" that will end up costing taxpayers more than £19bn, according to leading academics and economists.

The London School of Economics (LSE) report, The Identity Project, is the result of an in-depth six-month investigation by more than 100 academics and many private-sector IT companies into the cost and feasibility of the ID card plans, and comes the day before MPs are due to vote on the bill in parliament.

The report claims the government has seriously underestimated the cost of the project and capability of the technology and that the whole ID card scheme will cost up to £19.2bn over 10 years compared to the government's current estimate of £5.8bn.

Even in its "best case scenario" the LSE predicts the project will still be double government figures at a cost of at least £10.6bn. Based on the LSE's calculations the unit cost of each ID card would be £230, compared to the government's estimate of £93.

However the government has already been forced to revise this cost upwards after internal Home Office estimates found that subsidising the cards for the elderly and people on benefits would force the cost of the cards to £110 each for everyone else.

Ian Angell, professor of information systems at the LSE, said the current government proposals are not feasible because they are too complex, technically unsafe and suffer from a lack of public trust and confidence.

"It's a dog's dinner and it's not going to work. I believe it is going to fail catastrophically. I can't believe anyone is foolhardy enough to try and implement it," he said.

Among the costs the LSE claims the government has underestimated are the biometric card readers and supporting infrastructure, which could cost up to £4,000 each instead of the £250 to £750 each in the Home Office's ID cards regulatory impact assessment.

Billions of pounds of additional costs have been ignored by the government for the re-scanning of biometrics every few years to keep them up-to-date, the administrative burden for enrolling people onto the national identity register, the integration costs of linking up local and central government IT systems to work with the ID database, and the cost of replacing the worn out or damaged cards.

The LSE report said: "No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world. Smaller and less ambitious systems have encountered substantial technological and operational problems that are likely to be amplified in a large-scale national system. The use of biometrics gives rise to particular concern because this technology has never been used at such a scale."

Doubts about the legality of the ID card proposals are also aired in the report and Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, said in the foreword: "I have expressed my unease that the current proposal to establish a national identification system is founded on an extensive central register of personal information controlled by government and is disproportionate to the stated objectives behind the introduction of ID cards."

A separate report from public sector research group Kable also claims the government has massively underestimated the cost of the ID card proposals and that the real cost will be closer to £15bn.

But Prime Minister Tony Blair hit back at the LSE figures in his monthly news conference today. "No government is going to start introducing something that's going to cost hundreds of pounds to people. That would be ridiculous," he said.

A full copy of the LSE report can be downloaded here