By Andy McCue, 31 October 2005 17:10
NEWS
The cost of an individual ID card could rise to almost £500 because of the cost of integrating the IT infrastructure with other government departments and public sector bodies, according to new figures from the London School of Economics (LSE).
The LSE has previously put the total cost of the ID card scheme at a maximum of £19bn - compared to the Home Office estimate of £5.8bn - which would work out to a unit cost of around £300 for producing each card.
But silicon.com understands that updated cost estimates yet to be published by the LSE calculate that integrating the ID card IT infrastructure with all the government departments and public bodies expected to use the national identity register will cost an extra £5bn to £10bn - bringing the total cost of the scheme nearer to £30bn.
The ID Card bill started its passage through the House of Lords today with peers making their opening comments during a debate on the proposed legislation.
Several peers launched scathing attacks on the bill. Baroness Anelay of St Johns said the proposed legislation is too broad and raises concerns about civil liberties.
She said: "The government proposals at the moment are not just expensive but excessive."
The latest figures follow a warning from senior civil servant Ian Watmore, the government's CIO, who said at the weekend that the rollout of ID cards could be delayed if the technology is not ready.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Watmore said: "Just because the date comes round, it does not mean you switch it on then."
He said ID cards would be phased in over "quite a long period of time" following small-scale pilots with groups such as scout masters and teachers to establish whether the technology works.
He told the paper: "If they don't work, we won't go forward. Biometrics is something which has not been used on the scale of a national implementation."
Comments
There are 19 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
There already exists some aspects for a a secure system for the ID scheme and its used daily and works well.
Credit cards are a form that can be upgraded and improved to incorporate the ID needs.
It does not have to be created from scratch and is already proven and robust.
There is a huge backlash to this technology based not on reason and logic but a bias concerning human rights and abuse possibility.
But we can no longer stand aside and permit anyone from coming to this land, using our NHS and committing crime or worse terrorist activities.
Those who provide criticism should also ponder a better solution.
2. anonymous
I thought one of the foundations of ID cards would be it would *SAVE* UK PLC money.
£30bn.
Utter waste of money, future IT fiasco.
Before you even argue about effectiveness again terrorism, fraud, civil liberties issues....etc
3. Marat Bekmetov
£500 to produce a card?! - It seems to me like a money-raising execise, where (I guess) £40 is for a card (if 30-40 million to be produced) and the rest is going to plug governments budget holes and/or other purposes.
What's the difference compare to credit cards, why can't we use similar proven technology?
Is it another millenium dome?
4. anonymous
£30bn - a good number for a waste of time, it is also:
The estmated damage of Hurricane Katrina
The Debt Relief to the 3rd World
The Irish National Debt
Amount of Anglo Dutch bilateral trade
I have an idea instead of having a silly IT system that wont work and be badly implemeneted, lets spend it on the police, or hospitals or debt relief or tax relief or research. I am sure I am not the only one who can think of a million better uses for £30bn.
£500 a card and I suspect thats not the whole amount a lot would be lost or hidden lest we realise our emplyees and thier managers are incompetent.
5. anonymous
The issue here is why so expensive?
Answer
We the tax payer are being conned by companies into the cost of IT.
Those of us who work now its cost and the Goverment is being used for easy money
6. anonymous
Visitor to the UK will not be issued with an ID Card, they will only be issued to registered UK residents.
How will this prevent terrorism?
7. anonymous
There is no Tech fix for ID, the identity thieves are adept at mastering new technologies, there is no such thing as a 100% secure system. Witness the inability of governments and big business to protect their data goodies from hackers etc.
I also think this "blind" assumption that its going to fix terrorism or whatever is crazy. The london bombers were on nobody's radar, so how would an ID card identify them ?
The £30bn should be spent on the inteligence services, law enforcement & cybercrime units. I would expect more security that way than from a biometric piece of plastic that someone will crack sooner or later.
Also if the estimate is £30bn double that by the time that the government has messed up the project!
8. Brian Montgomery
All those readers of silicon.com who work for major systems integrators and business change consultancies know that this excessive level of expenditure is nothing to be surprised about.
Far from being a cost minimisation exercise this is a classic example of a great project sale - proposing vast and unnecessary complexity and then offering to solve it at equally vast expense.
Who proposes the implementation processes and systems underlying them ? None other than the consulting companies and systems integrators who intend to implement them. The only determination of price is the level of bid collusion or price competition between the various systems houses making offers to do the work. Poor civil servants secure in the knowledge that they too have no job to lose and woefully lacking in any real world business experience or commercial IT knowledge have little incentive to do anything other than accept the least worst offer they are made from a very short list of approved primary contractors.
But fellow readers of silicon.com - IT professionals, contractors and other business people - we all accomplices in spending our own tax money in this way. Rather than leave it to the journalists of silicon.com, its up to us to change this if we want to.
9. Jerrold Baldwin
No surprise, the state’s potential law-and-order technology contractors expect to be paid. Otherwise, their directors will not bother to concoct these ill-conceived yet dangerous schemes in the first place. Nor will they bother to instigate the climate of fear, in which these schemes exist.
Will these £500 cards protect us from rule-breaking Government officials? No. It now seems that I am far better behaved than the people who want to monitor my every move. Alas, tomorrow may well belong to them.
Let hopes that our un-elected representatives have more sense than the elected ones. Remember that less than 40% of us voted for the elected ones. I wonder if one could now find 80% of people in favour of this defective plan, even in the Home Office?
Whilst on the subject of Government and technology, I think that David Blunkett should undergo voice stress analysis while he defends himself. You never know, we may be pleasantly surprised; and it would demonstrate a practical, and future use, for the software.
10. Richard Davies
So if they don't work and we don't move forward with them...do we get our tax payers money back thats so far been wasted? With this much money involved...I think that you should ensure that the project would work before even giving it a green light to go ahead.
11. anonymous
I agree we need a system, I am not doubting the need, after all every French or German child carries an ID and we are one of the few countries who don’t, but ..............
It is effective against terrorism if you stop the person and ask to see his ID otherwise it is an expensive waste of time. The recent terrorist acts in the US and UK have all been carried out by people legally in the country or even nationals of both countries, so this system wont help.
I agree we need one, I agree it should be tied to the National Insurance Number to get our services, just as the Social Security Card/Number is in the US. Perhaps the Credit Card companies are the people to ask to help design it, not the Integrators, perhaps we need an operator to define a system that works.
Many moons ago I had a credit card with my picture on, that with a chip/pin would be a simple cost effective solution and achieve 90% of the aims of the card.
As in the USA you could mandate that without the SS number you cant do most things to deal with banking, health care even some lottery wins etc and use it as proof of ID, linked to a simple back end for integration / checking this would allow the system to operate cost effectively.
My concern with this system is it is too big, too complicated and by the time it is integrated with all the extras that come along later, too expensive to purchase or maintain.
Lets go back to basics here, lets dump the "21st Century Technology" (we are now 6% into that now) and lets get something simple that can work and get it out there, then we can implement incremental upgrades throughout the other 94% of the century as each upgrade is shown to be needed and the technology proven.
Hang on ...... Isnt that what the commercial sector normally do? and the system works.
Lets have a card, base it on proven technology forget biometrics for now do that later, get cards, chips with basic data and pictures and integrate to the NI database (now theres a good numbering system). Biometrics etc lets do later when it can be shown that serious bad people cant defeat it.
Cheap and fast to roll out, catch the bad guys in the checking process when they apply for cards, not too hard and not too costly. Make it simple, make it work, keep it working and current with upgrades over the next century or so. That’s my vote.
I was taught at college if it looks wrong it probably is. To me, today, this looks grossly wrong, far too ambitious, and case not proven for a lot of the aspects that are going to be the most expensive.
Lets not make the same mistakes as in the past, this reminds me of a plane Howard Hughes once built, The Spruce Goose a project sold as an idea to another government based on a need, but the technology wasn’t there to accomplish it but was designed and built anyway to meet a government contract, under powered, over speced, cost a fortune.
12. anonymous
I don't know where the consultants get their figures.
Ask Barclaycard or GemPlus how much a card costs. Sub £3 for sure. Even adding the 'labour' to produce it, and you can't exceed a fiver.
Then add a database capable of holding enough rows, and the figure is still nowhere near those quoted.
And it won't stop fraudsters or terrorists - or am I the only person who thinks that those categories of people would tell lies or forge a card?
13. Alan Smith
Reply to anonymous...
To begin with no one has ever been prevented from commiting a crime or act of terrorism while possessing an ID card.
If you are happy to allow local councilors, who may live on your street or even next door, bank managers, MP's, police, etc access to information such as where you have been, what you have purchased when this occurred, to build up patterns of information that will be available to many government departments and the personnel inside them (who may wish to blackmail you) then fine please go and live in Uzbekistan or some other police state beacuse in case you havn't noticed we are currently a relatively free country (although that is seriously being erroded.) and I for one would like to keep it that way.
I will leave the country rather than submit to this degrading and humiliating ID card. How soon will it be befors they incorporate RFID tags into our bodies at birth? I would say 10-15 years tops.... watch this space
14. Allan Gordon
Dear Mr Anonymous London, how you can say that the backlash to this technology is not based on reason or logic is beyond me. Firstly, the technology has not been tested thoroughly enough to ensure adequate protection of sensitive information such as biometrics. Secondly, did you read the figures of the FARs and FRRs of the tests previously carried out? Not very convincing technology eh?!? And finally, do you honestly believe that an identity card is going to stop terrorism? I think not my good fellow, maybe Mr Blair changing his foreign policy might stop terrorism but a plastic card will not!!! The sooner some of the people of this land get their heads out of the clouds and see this exersice for what it is the better!
15. Karen Challinor
This bill will overturn one of the central tenets of the legal system, whereby you are assumed to be innocent of a crime unless you can be proved innocent.
Once the bill is in place that will change, for example the police will only want to talk to you unless they have proof you were near the scene of a crime, the NIR database will provide a list of everyone who falls into this category, the police will assume one person in this group is guilty and question all of them accordingly forcing them to prove their innocence, i.e. you will be assumed guilty until you can prove your innocence, so the burden of proof will have been reversed.
This bill will not prevent foreign terrorists from coming to the UK and committing acts of atrocity, if they are here less that three months they won't even be monitored.
This bill will not prevent criminals from performing criminal acts, these people will find non legal ways to circumvent the NIR and the card rendering it useless.
This bill will however track and monitor the ordinary everyday law abiding citizen of the UK and should that person make just one mistake, will punish them ferociously.
What exactly is the purpose of this bill ?
16. Brian Curnow
As you say the Credit Card system could possibly be upgraded and utilised, with the co-operation of the Banks, as part of the new ID Cards project.
Also the Driving Licence database already exists as well and photo Driving Licences have been issued for some time now.
So there may be the basis of a far simpler and less costly system that's already in place if Government chose to go that route.
We don't really need yet another National Database, that's for sure. We should be reusing and upgrading IT systems where possible, not reinventing the wheel!
17. anonymous
I see the Americans are now going to put RFIDs into the US Passport. That should help them track their citizens. How about we add that to the ID card and then the Home Office will know exactly who we are and where we are at any time.
So passports, credit cards or driving licences are no good for identifying citizens. We need a fourth document. I see a job here until I retire. Millenium Bug all over again. Whoo Hoo! We'll make out like bandits...again.
18. Brian Drury
If the Ientity Bill becomes law, you will be fingerprinted and the police will be permitted to compare your prints with those found at crime scenes.
Electronic fingerprint comparison is not perfect. Under good conditions, 1 in 100,000 comparisons will match with an innocent person (National Physical Laboratory figures).
This is not too much of a problem now as the police only have access to the fingerprints of known criminals.
Once the Government has all our prints, false matches with law-abiding citizens will therefore start to happen.
Innocent people will be investigated by the police. Some will be imprisoned.
19. Karen Challinor
As Mr Drury says fingerprint matching technology is not perfect.
What is matched is the position and orientation of key features such as loops and points, on the size of database currently used in the USA a 10 point match is good enough to give someone a death sentence.
However mistakes can still be made as it's only the position and orientation of points that are compared and not the entire pattern.
There is as yet no data giving the false positive or false negative rate for fingerprints.
We are proposing to use a database many times larger than those currently in use in the USA and I for one do not wish to be either a false positive or false negative when the police are investigating a crime, do you ?