Blair: ID card scheme won’t cost £20 billion
Prime Minister Tony Blair has rejected reports that the Government’s ID card scheme would cost £300 per person to roll out.
Mr Blair said the cost would be less than £30 more than the cost of the new biometric passports, which will be brought in by 2008 under EU law.
His comments come as a major new report suggests the ID card scheme could cost nearly £20 billion – or £300 per person.
A six-month study by the London School of Economics reveals that even on low and median estimates, implementing the ID card scheme would cost between £170 and £230 per person.
With individuals having to bear the cost of the cards under existing Treasury rules, the report has been seized upon by critics of the scheme.
A Mail on Sunday poll showed that just one in ten people would back plans for an ID card scheme if each adult was charged £100.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: “We have always thought that support for ID cards would melt like snow in the sun when the British public realised how much they would cost, the practical implications involved and the threat to security and civil liberties they would pose.”
But Mr Blair said: “I think people in principle like the idea, but are put off by media stories that they will cost £300.”
He told reporters at his monthly press conference in London: “No government is going to start introducing something that’s going to cost hundreds of pounds to people – that would be ridiculous,” Mr Blair told reporters.
“But there are good reasons for doing this now, because of the change to technology, the fact that we will have to pay for biometric passports and the ID card part of it is a very small additional cost.”
The LSE report, the work of a steering group of 14 professors at the LSE’s department of information systems, also identifies a series of other key areas of concern.
It suggests that ID cards perform best when their purpose is clear and focused, while the UK scheme has “multiple rather general rationales, suggesting it has been ‘gold-plated’ to justify the high tech scheme”.
The report also describes the scheme as appearing “to be unsafe in law” with a number of elements potentially compromising articles within the European Convention on Human Rights on privacy and discrimination.
The LSE is putting forward an alternative to the scheme that has wider applications for business and therefore could attract business funding to keep costs down.
Dr Gus Hosein, a fellow in the Department of Information Systems at LSE, said: “We have proposed an alternative model that we believe to be cheaper, more secure and more effective than the current government proposal.
“It is important that Parliament gets the chance to consider a range of possible models before the ID Cards Bill is passed. Even if Government figures were correct, the costs of the Government scheme are disproportionately higher than the scheme’s ability to protect the UK from crime, fraud or terrorism.”
Other areas of concern highlighted by the report include whether the technology would work when rolled out on such a large scale, and whether such a national data register would be secure from hacking and unauthorised access.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said: “This report should be the final nail in the coffin for Labour’s identity card proposals. The more ID cards are investigated, the less credible they appear.”
He added: “It is imperative that the opposition parties and Labour backbenchers work together to kill off this dangerous and costly Bill.”
Phil Booth, national coordinator of the NO2ID said: “The Government told us after the election that they would listen to the people, but instead they put their hands over their ears and keep shouting the same old nonsense.”
The ID Cards Bill returns to the House of Commons for its second reading on Tuesday.
