13 October 2006
The Home Office has undervalued the cost of its controversial ID card scheme, critics have warned, despite ministers' claims this week that it would cost taxpayers £5.4bn over ten years.
Home Office minister Liam Byrne attempted to put an end to the argument over the cost of the proposed national ID card system on October 9, when he presented to Parliament a report estimating the 'likely cost' for UK nationals at £5.4bn by 2016.
Byrne later told a meeting at the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank that around 70% of the cost – £3.8bn – will need to be spent, regardless of any ID card system, so that the UK complies with international biometric passport requirements, designed to tackle illegal immigration.
Around 15% of the cost – £810m – would fund the IT system, he added.
But Byrne merely presented the cost of introducing and operating an ID card system, and its complementary register of biometric data, at the Home Office.
Other departments are involved in the project because Whitehall also wants to use ID cards to combat benefit fraud and wider identity fraud and to determine eligibility for NHS treatments.
William Heath, chair of Kable, the market research company that advises many of the government's potential IT partners, said: 'We really need an honest assessment of the whole cost of this exercise. Liam [Byrne] presented… the Home Office's costs.
'Taxpayers have to pick up the whole tab – including what it costs to re-engineer work at the Department for Work and Pensions, local authorities and general practitioners.'
Byrne has argued that the government could not provide information on costs at the Department of Health, for example, 'as these elements may be acquired from the market [and] are, therefore, commercially sensitive'.
But Heath said: 'That's a lame and tired argument for not disclosing what it's really going to cost to re-engineer modern transformational government along the lines of a single identifier [an ID card].
'Competition [for the contracts] will get the price down. I don't think that being evasive about these half-baked plans is a good way of getting prices down.'
A senior Whitehall source told Public Finance that it 'should now be possible' for the government to produce a whole-cost estimate following Home Secretary John Reid's summer review of the policy.
PFoct2006
