Civitas Blog

The principle purpose of the cards given by the government changes constantly, as each reason is presented and rebuffed, so it pays to look at some of them in turn.

Are ID cards a proper response to the terrorist threat? Simply, no: they are the wrong answer to the problems of crime and security. They will offer the illusion of safety based on technology not intelligence. ID cards in Spain did not prevent the Madrid bombings, nor would they have done anything to stop 9/11. Richard Reed, like most terrorists, did not hide his identity, only his intention.

Are ID cards going to be effective in controlling immigration? As we have just heard, the government guesses there could be as many as 570,000 illegal immigrants (multiply that by three to get a more accurate estimate), so there are already so many illegals in Britain as to render the scheme almost pointless. The only way it would work would be if ID cards were mandatory for every British citizen, and the borders were far more stringently manned - or just manned.

Are ID cards going to stop benefit fraud? Less than 2 per cent of benefit fraud is due to ID fraud; instead, benefit fraudsters tend to misrepresent their circumstances. The fact that there are 73 million live national insurance records, but only 46.5 million in the country entitled to a national insurance record hardly fosters confidence in the government's ability to run such a scheme.

Are ID cards going to stop ID fraud? Biometric testing can hardly be said to be failsafe. Even if with three biometric measures it could be said to be 99.9 per cent effective, there would still be a 1 in 48,000 failure rate, which means that someone would be able to access several different records using his own biometrics in order to create different identities (99.9 per cent is, by the way, beyond the realm of possibility).

Are ID cards going to stop crime? If they ever catch them, police rarely have trouble identifying suspects, only proving they're guilty. Cards won't deter criminals unless the government gives police stop and search powers and, again, for this to be effective the card would have to be mandatory. And even still, the police already have the power to stop and question someone if they have reasonable suspicion they're about to commit a crime. So it is difficult to see what difference ID cards would make, unless the criminal kindly leaves his propped up on the mantlepiece after stealing your DVD player.

Then of course there is the question of viability. Can we really trust the government to deliver such a high-risk centralised database? The ID system would require data to be permanently accessible from a wide range of public and private locations, which would mean building one of the most complex computer systems on the planet. The government's own Information Commissioner says it is 'unecessary', and the UK Computer Research Committee has expressed 'deep scepticism about the Home Office's ability to specify, procure and implement a national software intensive system on the scale that would be necessary'. Let's not forget the Home Office's record on IT is hardly perfect - recent failures include the tax credits benefits system - and it is a fact universally acknowledged that hackers can access pretty much anything they want to these days. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the European Commission has expressed doubts about the storage of such secure information on a central database due to the 'risk of data misuse', which is why Germany is sensibly introducing a passport with facial biometrics and fingerprints - but not on a central database.

What about the costs? Who is going to fund libraries, banks and hospital emergency services for the card reading machines to be installed? Quite apart from the expense of each individual card, that money will obviously have to come from the taxpayer. No one can say how much the cards will cost, and the government dismisses the LSE's calculation of anything up to £15 billion for the whole system, but then the government never is too reliable about the costs of such projects. It said that the criminal court computer system would cost £150 million, but that ended up costing £400 million, and it said that moving GCHQ's computers to another building would cost £20 million, and that ended up being closer to £450 million. The cost of the scheme will be phenomenal, and what's spent on ID cards cannot be spent on anything else. Money would be better used to provide thousands of extra police officers and invest in courts, prisons and rehabilitation centres that would provide genuine security for the citizens of this country.

This risks becoming the lastest security failure, a multi-billion pound blunder, and what will we get out of it? Check your Orwell.