At the recent vote on 20th December Paddy voted in favour of the introduction of ID cards (as did fellow Nottinghamshire MPs, Geoff Hoon, John Heppell, Graham Allen - Nottingham South MP Alan Simpson didn't vote). As his constituent I'm not too pleased about this:
a) Biometric identification isn't that good. See this
New Scientist article. It's not going to stop multiple identities, or provide a rapid and foolproof way of identifying people.
b) The cost of the scheme is likely to outweigh any savings in fraud reduction etc. A rough rule of thumb for large government IT projects seems to be that they cost three times as much as the estimate. Plus we'll probably never be allowed to know how much it costs for 'commercial reasons'.
c) It will have little value in reducing terrorism, because terrorism isn't a problem now. How many people have been killed by terrorists in the UK since 9/11? (Clue: it's less than one). Spend the money on something that will save lives, like cleaning hospitals properly.
d) It's particularly susceptible to function creep, with plenty of provisions in the bill for expanding the remit.
e) The government has a miserable record on even simple IT projects like issuing passports. The chances of this not being chaos seem pretty low.
f) The database would be very susceptible to misuse, either by the government itself, or by individuals using the information illegally.
