ID card costs

In The Register, John Lettice attempts to unravel the various statements made by ministers lately about the cost of the National ID card in the light of the LSE’s substantially more pessimistic realistic calculations:

We should be clear that this particular argument is really about overall cost. The LSE’s numbers reflect the group’s view that the Government’s own claims for overall cost are extremely optimistic, so the low LSE estimate is substantially higher than the current Government estimate, which itself has climbed substantially since the scheme was first mooted. As the Government has declined to explain how its own figure is derived, we have no proof that it is realistic, while the LSE group’s assumptions are explained in some detail in its report. If the Government is right, then perhaps a cost of £93 is sustainable, but if it’s wrong, then “as Treasury rules currently require”, a higher number will have to apply. In considering the Government’s ability to get it right, then it’s surely only reasonable to remind everybody of the numbers it first thought of, and published in the entitlement cards consultation document in 2002. These were a £10-£19 price increase in passport and driving licence fee in order to subsidise a standalone card cost of £5-£15, with the card being given to the 10 million poorest people. Ahem.

[…]

[Comments on how some of the cost of ID cards can be subsidised by the £70 charge the government proposes to make for biometric passports snipped.] There are plenty of other areas where (the Home Office no doubt hopes) scheme costs can vanish into other budgets. Infrastructure and reader cost to the NHS, for example, can be ‘disappeared’ into the National Programme for IT budget, and ID card operated by the police and the immigration service can come out of the budgets of the police and immigration service. Are these ID scheme costs or not? We don’t know, and we suspect Charles Clarke doesn’t know either, right now.

In other words, it’s not so much a question of “how much will ID cards cost?” as it is “how much of the cost will the government manage to offload to other government programmes?” Pitiful.