The cost of the government's controversial £4.4bn
national
identity card scheme, could rise significantly because of the
difficulties reading fingerprints of older people, a government
watchdog says.
Chief Scientist John Beddington, chairman of the Biometrics
Assurance Group, an independent government advisor, said in his
2007 annual report that elderly people often had hard-to-read
fingerprints. This might produce a large number of exceptions that
would strain the ability of the Identity and Passport Service to
handle them.
"Exception handling has a large impact not only on the technical
elements of the scheme, but on business processes, schedules and
costs," Beddington said.
There were more than four million people in the UK aged over 75,
the report said.
The Identity and Passport Service said it had paid for research
into how to enrol people with hard-to-record biometric
characteristics. It had asked the usability and performance working
group to align its research programme with the scheme's
procurement schedule and to use more people in their tests.
The House of Lords Science & Technology select committee
warned two years ago that
more than one in 1,000 fingers are missing or have no
fingerprint due to scar tissue. People who work a lot with their
hands or who have very fine-grained skin may also produce poor
quality fingerprints.