10 May 2007
The Dobson report, the regular update to Parliament on the progress of the
ID card scheme, was released today [1] - at the same time that Tony Blair
was announcing his resignation as Prime Minister. Privacy and civil liberty
campaigners NO2ID [2] blasted Home Office figures which show an increase of
£640 million in the last 6 months while attempting to discount a further
£510 million from future calculations [3].
Phil Booth, NO2ID's National Coordinator said:
“With each new analysis, the cost of the ID card scheme spirals. In effect,
this report says that the total cost to British citizens has gone up by over
a billion pounds in six months. If they keep this up, the scheme will end up
costing far more than even the LSE estimate.”
“Brazenly claiming credit for work already done [4], and smoke and mirrors
accounting shows not only contempt for Parliament but contempt for the
facts.”
-ENDS-
Notes for editors:
1) http://www.identitycards.gov.uk/downloads/2007-05-10CostReport.pdf - the
report, required every six months under section 37 of the Identity Cards Act
2006, is almost a month late and comes suspiciously close to the splitting
of the Home Office and Tony Blair’s resignation announcement.
2) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the
database state. Scroll down http://www.no2id.net for a list of ‘database
state’ initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing. NO2ID is affiliated to
by the National Union of Journalists:
http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=1595
3) The headline figures given by the Home Office have always been costs to
the Home Office alone. This report makes it clear that the National Identity
Scheme will incur significant costs elsewhere. It explicitly dumps £510
million in costs onto the Foreign Office, fails to quantify the additional
cost to the Department for Work and Pensions - whose Citizen Information
Service database must now be upgraded to form a key part of the National
Identity Register - and excludes the cost of issuing ID Cards to potentially
millions of people, e.g. “future costs of issuing ID Cards to other foreign
nationals such as visa holders coming to the UK for extended periods,
non-EEA foreign nationals already settled in the UK and EEA nationals.” [p8]
The Home Office’s £640 million rise in six months represents an increase of
12%, which translated into the price of the card would mean the £93 passport
and ID card package now costing £105.
4) “Developments over the last six months” [p4] are nothing of the sort.
ePassports were already fully implemented before the last Dobson report in
October 2006. The Public Affairs Committee was highly critical of some
aspects of the ePassport programme, and the ID interrogations “scheduled for
May 2007” are already well over 6 months behind the original announced
schedule.
For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please
contact Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net)
on 07974 230 839, Guy Herbert (General Secretary,
general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308, or Michael Parker (Press
Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166.
The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ
enquiries@no2id.net
Tel: 07005 800 651
Press: click here
