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Identity Cards Bill

I share the concerns about the cost of identity cards and the charges that will ultimately be levied for them. The Government have given us no indication of the way in which their estimate of £580 million or so a year for the cost of the scheme is broken down between what is necessary to comply with international requirements for passports and what is needed to create their comprehensive identity scheme, which is about not only identity cards but the national identity register. The Government claim that international requirements account for 70 per cent. of the cost of the scheme. However, let us consider the figures that we have. The current cost of our passport is £42.36. Next year, that will increase by the substantial amount of £15.57 to £57.93. I asked the Government for the reason for the increase and they replied that it was largely due to the delivery of several key counter-fraud initiatives, notably interviews for all first-time applicants, links with other public sector databases and the full implementation of facial biometric passports. That is just for the facial biometric, not for the other biometrics that will be required. Yet the cost of the full implementation of the scheme will be £93, to include £30 for the ID card. The passport, without the ID card, will cost £63. That is an increase of only £5.07, which implies only an additional 10 per cent. cost for the minimal requirement of the facial biometric. These figures beggar belief. How are we going to achieve all the additional biometrics—all 10 fingerprints, plus iris recognition and the facial biometric—and the implementation of the national identity register with all the continual changes involved, for that amount? This is not comparable with the present UK passport database, which is a static database. Between 2006 and 2007, we shall move over to the full implementation of the scheme, with its constantly changing database, yet we are told that it is going to cost only an extra 10 per cent. Even the cost of the whole package, at £93, still represents a fairly modest increase for such a huge change in the scheme. The Government are giving us assurances about keeping the costs down, but perhaps the best way for them to achieve that would be to abandon this scheme and do what the Americans, the Germans and all the other European countries are doing, which is to have an ID card or passport that has just a few simple biometrics and no central database.