Who pays for the ID card?
The Register has a discussion of the costs of the UK’s proposed ID-card scheme. Following the recent LSE report, which said that the costs of the scheme would be 2-3 times what the Government had been claiming, the Government has been rubbishing the report. Unfortunately for them, most of its figures actually come from Government documents – so they are effectively rubbishing their own experts. The current way to keep the apparent costs down is to focus on the price of the card to the individual – neatly hiding all the other costs in charges to Government departments (i.e. in taxation). In other words, capping the price of an ID card at £30 just means that we’ll pay the rest of the true cost in tax.
More worryingly, there seems to be no sign that anyone within the Government has really worked out the total cost of the scheme – or, if they have, they’re not admitting it. For example, despite the fact that what the ID card is supposed to do has increased (i.e. three biometrics instead of one), the predicted costs of card readers has dropped precipitously (from £10,000 each to £250-£750).
If, somewhere within the Government, someone is tallying up the total cost of the scheme and all its related components, then the big number would quite probably fall within the LSE range of £10.6-£19.2 billion. Given how career-threatening such a tallying exercise might be, we very much doubt that anybody’s doing it. But if you think about it, it’s exactly what the Government should be doing, then putting the facts before the country and Parliament before embarking on such a scheme. As opposed to the current approach of “capping” card cost at “only” £30, and avoiding telling anybody, probably including themselves, what it will all really cost.
pax et bonum
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