How believable are government claims on ID cards?

And the cost

Did the survey mention the ID card fiasco would cost £20bn+ to the taxpayer and the Government would probably lose all the ID data at some point before asking the questions?

We might need that money to bail out some more banks before too long.

Or the UK could have single handedly build 2 full scale prototype fusion reactors with the ID card money - it's taken 10 years and most of the world's economies to stump up the £10bn to build one in France.

our survey said.........

If you ask 2000 people in north london what team they support, then weight it as national statistics, you'd find the whole country support tottenham, arsenal or man u....what is surveying a group of people in one area got to do with a cross section of the populus? if you want true opinion, you need at least 2000 people in at least 30 different area's.

I bet it's less than one in four in reality, and in area's like Harringey or Bradford with high migrant populations, possibly none in 1 million, they come here to get away from the dictator states.

even Paris would laugh at those figures quoted

@Steve

"Perhaps finding out that the police are already (illegally) recording conversations between innocent people and their MP."

Hang on. I'm all for scrapping ID cards but where did this come from? If you're referring to the recent scandal then you might want to rethink the word "innocent".

Benefits?

What I find most laughable is that all they are trying to measure is the success (or lack therof) of their own spin and marketing.

On one have they try and convince the population that ID cards will solve all of their problems, and then they try and find out whether they have been successful in doing so.

My 2p worth is that there are almost no benefits to ID cards, especially when confronted with the associated costs to the taxpayer.

The biggest problem with the government is that they do not do what people really want them to do, instead they have their own hidden agendas and try to convince people that they should follow them.

Q: How believable are government claims on ID cards?

A: As believable as government claims on pretty much anything: not at all.

Servant of the people?!

My knowledge of history is patchy, but my understanding is that we transitioned over a few hundred years from having no choice in who lorded over us, to having one 20-millionth of a choice every four years.

The government has never been the servant of the people - you're thinking of that Greek concept of "democracy", which has never been implemented since, unless you count the rich and influential as "the people" and you count everyone else as "the slaves".

The idea of "returning" the government to being the servant of the people is a false one. We first need to *invent* a form of government where this is the case.

@Oli Wright

Care to tell us what Babar Ahmad has been convicted of?

Or have you already totally swallowed our current government's favourite idea of "Guilty until proven innocent"?

As always, hampered by their own penny-pinching ...

... like with all grand schemes, as soon as the bottom line is approached, the government starts to cripple itself ....

I'm convinced that if the government had quietly accepted the card would cost the citizen nothing, then they could have pushed forward with a far more ambitious ID scheme with nary a murmour.

Lucky for the anti ID card brigade (me included) they fatally allowed the press to spin the "100 quid a pop" story, which instantly made people everywhere "anti" on priciple.

It's a reversal of the situation where they got away with increasing NI because "it's for the health service[1]"

[1] yeah, right

Hyperbole

Perhaps if the government had focussed on the real likely benefits, none of this disasterous own goal would have happened. Real world identity cards are an expensive way of dealing with terrorism and border control. What modern government could do with (and it would the citizens who have to interact with Government frquently or infrequently too) is a proper link between a citizens real world identity and an electronic identity. The government gateway was a start but it is horrendous to use as the usernames and passwords were so unwieldy. So every seperate government department has to run its own identity management scheme and few can run a proper one (and end up sending linking details to each other in insecure means).

A single digital identity for transactions with government has a business case that other countries have readily recognised, particularly where many such transactions use Notaries to authenticate that people are who they say they (ie trusted third parties). But the costs of set up would be too high to justify in the press, so the straw man of terrorism is created instead, and after all most of those who would benefit are not middle-class theorists but those who have to engage with multiple government departments on a frequent basis (ie claimants - have you ever filled out a job seekers allowance form? Fancy taking on a weeks work so that you have to fill it out again afterwards? )

I'll beleive NO2ID's worries are real when they all burn their passports, NHS cards, mobiles, loyalty cards, Amazon accounts etc. If the government wanted to snoop on them, it already would, and they are happy enough with commercial snooping which benefits noone but the companies that send them marketing

How believable?

Put it this way. If you look closely, you can see their trousers smoking when they speak.

jumped up library card

It would be impressive if they could demonstrate JUST ONE indisputable benefit of ID cards.

Over the years the ID card has been downgraded from a high security, high accuracy card based on new data to a jumped up library card based on the inaccurate and easily faked data in the passport and drivers license databases.

To force people to carry the ID card they have to make it an every day thing - which means integrating something like public transport and congestion charge into the system. But we know from history that the government just cannot run such complex system integration projects. The cost of the card will be minor compared to the cost of making it ubiquitous.

Reason why this ID card should not be implemented at any cost.

These ID cards would not work at most places where there is no reading equipment and hence it will be waste of time and money to implement this system which will only make bad problems worse.

A simpler solution...

Put the persons photo on the credit cards and get the banking system to issue ID cards if they must. They already have good identity databases of people. The photo's can be taken from your overall credit file. They do this in other countries (for example Sweden).

The majority of cost will come from security. I would much rather trust a banks security over the governments security. The banks will already have card bureau services available for production and the infrastructure already in place.

Stop with expensive government IT projects that go overbudget, don't deliver what they are intended, and have security holes the size of the grand canyon.

So...

"The survey used a sample of 2,052 people weighted to reflect the UK population."

I'd love to know the break down of this... 300 Poles, 100 Romanian Gypsies, 200 claiming asylum but won't reveal where they're from, 150 who ticked boxes but ran before leaving their name... etc etc...

Oh, and 25 white anglo-saxon c of e natives.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

It's interesting to spot the bias that is built into the available answers.

Look at Section 5 - believability. There are five possible answers:

Very believable

Somewhat believable

Slightly believable

Not at all believable

Don't know

So with three of the answers you believe in these fairy stories. Cunning. Where is the "Somewhat unbelievable" or "Slightly unbelievable"?

Then on the next page we read: "mean score out of 5, where 5 is very important and 1 is not at all important". But there were only two options between these choices. So they are mapping four answers onto the range 1 to 5.

Eighty-three percent of statistics are made up on the spot.

I love this government

They spend all their time destroying civil liberties in the name of preventing terrorist.

Maybe when they create all these wonderful new laws that the police have to inforce, they should remember one thing...

The UK police force polices by consent... maybe GB should read the principles which the police force was formed on, before trying to create a police state...

To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Still the biggie

On what basis are they going to assign identity cards? Presumably, people are going to have to produce something else that proves their identity to the government's satisfaction before getting the new card.

So why can't (whatever documentation would be necessary and sufficient to obtain a national identity card) just be used in its place, whenever anyone is required to prove their identity?

By the way, if you fancy committing identity theft, you can do a lot worse than visit http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22curriculum+vitae.doc%22

@@Oli Wright

Oh come on all you bleeding-heart liberals. He's been accused of terrorism AND he has brown skin. I mean, come on, how much more PROOF could you need? OBVIOUSLY a trial would be superfluous - since we all KNOW he's guilty it would be a foregone conclusion and therefore a waste of time and money.

New Aussie Gov scrapping ID card.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23211302-949,00.html

MORE than $1 billion that would have been spent on introducing a controversial access card for Australians will now be returned to federal coffers, Human Services Minister Joe Ludwig said.

Labor will scrap the Howard government's plan for an access card, which triggered privacy concerns and was compared to identity cards.

It was intended to replace the Medicare card and up to 16 other benefit cards, streamlining access to a range of health and welfare services.

Senator Ludwig said the card would have cost more than expected, without saving as much as it was supposed to. He said the money would be better spent on other policies.

"I'll return almost $1.2billion to the budget for taxpayers," Senator Ludwig said.

"We are focused on the practical things that will make a real difference, like online services, the co-ordination between agencies, data matching and data sharing, that's what the Rudd Labor government will focus on," he said.