The hidden costs and risks of Labour's ID card scheme

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Labour's identity cards scheme is dubious in principle. Objections to the plan are already well aired - such as the threat that ID cards pose to our civil liberties. But Labour's scheme is also dangerous in practice. Less attention to date has been paid to these practical problems. Yet they are no less formidable.

It's time to re-focus the ID cards debate on these problems: cost, technology, workability, human error and, above all, the woeful record of what, under Labour, is the most bungle-prone department in Whitehall - the Home Office.

Let's start with cost. I've repeatedly asked the Home Secretary to tell voters how much the taxpayer will have to shell out. No answer has been forthcoming. But one thing is certain: whatever figure is wrung out of the department, the real cost to the hard-pressed taxpayer will be much higher.

Independent estimates of that cost vary from £10billion to £20billion. Think of the number of new police who could be put on the beat, or border guards who could be placed in post, or officers who could undertake counter-terrorist activity for only a fraction of those sums.

The scheme's costs, expected to be more than ?90 a head, could perhaps be tolerated if the technology was in place to make it work.

But it isn't. It's still years away. Even if it wasn't, there's no evidence that would be proof against fraud. Experts have expressed doubts about the viability of the technology and the possible levels of errors, false positives, false negatives and other problems associated with it.

The viability of the technology is not simply a matter for academic debate: trials of the equipment, we learnt yesterday, have shown unacceptably high failure rates. Furthermore, terrorists who want to defraud such systems and exploit flawed technology always have the incentive to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

But even if the biometrics were foolproof, the Home Office will never be - at least, not under Labour. The Government has now decided that everyone registered on the national identity database will have to provide three different biometrics - a digital photograph, fingerprints and an iris print. All these details will have to be stored on computer.

The Home Office's record with computers is lamentable. Think for a moment about fingerprint records. Last November, the computer system holding those records broke down. So in London, for example, the Met couldn't get fingerprints identified for about two weeks.

Consider the opportunities that this IT collapse offered to criminals. And then ask yourself what opportunities an IT collapse involving identity cards would offer to terrorists.

Not so long ago, I met a number of senior police officers and asked them if they all supported Labour's ID cards scheme. They replied that they did.

So I asked them a simple question: how could they prevent someone using one of the access points to the computer system to insert a virus into the system?

These were extremely senior, highly intelligent men. Not one of them had an answer. And there are roughly 20,000 access points to the system.

So the system is a sitting duck for hackers - including, of course, terrorists. Think again of that old cliché ¡bout ID cards: "The innocent have nothing to fear". In the light of the openness of the system to viruses, if for no other reason, the innocent have a great deal to fear.

So the list of practical problems is formidable. The Government's ID cards scheme seems likely to illustrate one of the laws of life: the law of unexpected consequences.

FIRST, the Government announces a scheme - often to applause. Second, it tells us that there is overwhelming public support for that scheme, and dismisses critics.

Third, practical problems emerge, and the victims of those problems are not terrorists or criminals, but the innocent, hard-working and over-regulated public. The initial applause for the scheme is drowned out by a storm of protest. The Government backs down, and the inevitable public inquiry follows - at the taxpayers' expense.

Labour's ID cards scheme looks set to repeat that tragic cycle.

In the national interest, we gave the Government the chance, before the last election, to answer our practical objections to the scheme.

It's now plain that they have no answers to offer. So in the national interest, we now have no option but to oppose their plan - which is not only deeply suspect in principle, but completely flawed in practice.

 

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