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By silicon.com, 27 June 2005 18:10

Nothing, it seems, will force the UK government to back down over its half-cocked, hair-brained ID card proposals - and admit the costs have been underestimated and the database and biometric technologies are unproven for a project of this scale (over 67 million ID cards would be issued).

In the face of increasingly hostile opposition to the ID card plans from MPs, the public, academics, economists, the media and the IT industry - which is likely to be tasked with implementing the scheme - the Home Secretary Charles Clarke and his minions have resorted to simply labelling critics as "mad" and London School of Economics' estimates of a £19bn projected cost as "nonsense".

Indeed the Prime Minister himself came out to defend the ID card plans today, saying the biometric technology will work - that's the same Tony Blair whose wife admitted just before the election that he hasn't a clue when it comes to technology. The Home Office, meanwhile, trots out the convenient "commercially confidential" line to avoid having to put its figures under any public scrutiny.

The government has also indulged in some massaging of figures to support its increasingly flaky case. Take the £1.3bn cost of ID theft which the Home Office claims ID cards will supposedly tackle. Those figures have widely been discredited with the real figure around a tenth of that.

For example, the biggest fraud losses are not from people with fake IDs but from people with genuine IDs who simply lie about their circumstances, such as dole cheats who work on the side for cash in hand. The same goes for the insurance industry. The Association of British Insurers admitted last week that ID theft isn't a problem for them. The real areas where ID theft is a problem are on the internet and people raiding dustbins - neither of which would be addressed by a costly biometric ID card.

The other tactic the Home Office have resorted to when faced with probing questions about the ID card scheme is to simply ignore them. silicon.com, as you may recall, launched an 'ID Cards on Trial' campaign on 6 June asking the Home Office and Charles Clarke to address specific questions about the cost, scope and technological aspects of the scheme.

Prior to the launch of that campaign silicon.com had been embraced by the Home Office and been invited to special ID cards briefings, presumably because as a technology publication we were seen as being 'on side'. Since the launch of the campaign not one email or phone call to the Home Office has been returned.

This publication even offered Home Secretary Charles Clarke a platform on our site to address the concerns raised in our campaign by a range of cross-party politicians, technical experts and academics. His failure to respond speaks volumes about his lack of confidence in the Home Office's own ID cards business case. In fact, just this weekend, details have been leaked to the media of an internal Home Office memo admitting that the cost of ID cards will now actually be more than £100 each.

Despite this the government looks like it will narrowly win the vote at the second reading of the ID cards bill on Tuesday, thanks to unionist MPs and a number of abstentions from the Conservatives. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory for a "dog's dinner" of a scheme that looks set to run billions of pounds over budget and spiral wildly out of control.

The best hope is that the bill gets blocked in the House of Lords, or that select committee hearings and reports delay implementation long enough for the whole project to undergo a major rethink - or get quietly dropped altogether.

Until then silicon.com will keep up the 'ID Cards on Trial' campaign by pressing the government and the Home Office at every turn on the cost, scope and technical feasibility of the project.