ID cards to cost more than £5.5bn

The UK's identity cards scheme will cost more than £5.5bn to set up and run over the next 10 years, according to the government.

The cost of providing ePassports and ID cards to UK citizens for the period between April 2007 and April 2017 is estimated to be £5.55bn, according to the government's Identity Cards Scheme Cost Report May 2007.

At least every six months, the government is required to give parliament an estimate of the public cost likely to be incurred by the ID cards scheme over the following 10 years.

The previous cost report - released in October 2006 - projected costs from October 2006 to October 2016 of the ID cards and ePassports scheme to be more than £5.4bn.

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But the new figure includes a £400m increase added on for the number of staff necessary to deliver ID cards, and production costs for future biometric passports. And the £510m costs incurred by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in running consular services abroad was excluded, as it does not form part of the expenditure of the National Identity Scheme, the report said.

Phil Booth, national co-ordinator at the anti-ID card group, no2ID, predicted the costs will continue to rise.

Booth said the Home Office is shuffling costs onto other departments and agencies and UK citizens will still foot the bill, no matter which part of the government spends the money.

The government estimates the use of false identity information currently costs the UK more than £1.7bn per year and the ID scheme will make it much more difficult for such fraud to occur. But Booth said the government's £1.7bn cost estimate for identity fraud and the claimed benefits of ID cards have been "comprehensively refuted."