The government could cut billions of pounds from the cost
of its ID card scheme by abandoning its plans for a central
population register, without compromising its plans to fight ID
theft, terrorism and illegal immigration, the London School of
Economics has said.
The business school has developed an alternative model for a
national ID card scheme, based on smartcards loaded with a unique
digital certificate for each member of the population. It said this
would be cheaper, less risky, and more secure than the government's
existing scheme.
The London School of Economics estimates that the true cost of the
government's current biometric ID card proposals are likely to
reach between 12bn and 18bn, once the cost of issuing sophisticated
biometric readers is taken into account. This figure is more than
double the Home Office's 5.8bn estimate.
The London School of Economics' report, which went out to
consultation last week, is based on feedback from working groups,
academic experts and businesses, including the CBI, the British
Computer Society and IT suppliers.
It calls for the government to adopt a decentralised model for
checking the identities of the population. This model is favoured
by other European countries that have introduced electronic
identity cards, including Germany and Italy.
The plan would eliminate the need for a central biometric database,
which the London School of Economics said would be expensive to
develop and maintain, difficult to secure, and would introduce a
single point of failure into the system.
"Our system achieves practically all the policy goals that the
government has set out. We are proposing a more proportionate, less
intrusive system," said Gus Hosein, visiting professor in the
London School of Economics' department of information
systems.
Under the proposals, each government department would verify the
identity of members of the public by matching their digital
certificate against its own local database.
Rather than having a single unique number to identify each person,
each department would have a different reference number for each
individual, making the system more secure against identity theft.
Biometric identify verification could be built into the smartcard
if needed.
The complexity of the government's proposals makes them very
high-risk, said Hosein. He accused the government of using
commercial confidentiality as an excuse for refusing to disclose
the full costs of the scheme.
"Every government department and every police official would
require a biometric reader under the government model. We are not
just talking about a cheap reader. We are talking about a reader
that can match your iris scan and your fingerprint to one of 50
million people," he said.
The London School of Economics is expected to publish its full
report on the government's ID card programme later this month.