The ID Cards legislation had its Second Reading rather narrowly yesterday. Not by coincidence my Alma Mater, the London School of Economics, released their study into the costs and benefits of the scheme. As the Telegraph reports there are some differences on cost estimates:

The Home Office predicts that the scheme will cost £7 billion but the LSE puts the minimum cost at £10.6 billion - without the technical problems or overruns that have dogged other Whitehall IT projects - and suggests that it could rise to £19.2 billion.

There are also certain differences on the likely benefits.

Most damning for the Government is the fact that the study does not believe the ID system as proposed will fulfil any of its intended functions such as curbing identity fraud or countering terrorism. If anything, the existence of such a large database and the assumption that the system is foolproof, when it is likely to give false readings, will make it vulnerable to hacking and fraud. Professor Ian Angell, of the LSE's IT department, said the scheme was a "one-stop shop for fraudsters". "It is a dog's dinner. I do not believe it is going to work."

One of the defenses of the scheme is that biometrics have to be added to passports anyway:

"The next few years are going to see effectively a visa and passport revolution across the EU and the developed world. We are going to be in a position where we have to make our passports here in the UK biometric if UK citizens are to continue to enjoy the right to travel freely around the world." -Tony Blair.

Indeed we do need to add biometrics to UK passports but this is very different from the legislation being proposed. Chris Lightfoot has the details:

The ICAO biometric passport programme requires only that passports be equipped with a `smart-card' style chip containing information about the bearer (the same stuff that's printed in the machine-readable zone on the bottom of the back page of your passport in and angular OCR font), plus a digitised photograph and a cryptographic signature.

The Australian Government is managing this at a cost of 8 pounds per passport. Expensive, won’t work and not required. Could someone remind me why this Bill has been re-introduced?

(Tim Worstall writes here)