Would YOU pay £300 for an ID Card?
Local Lib Dems Sam Matthews and Darren Briddock are opposing Labour plans for ID cards. A report by the influential London School of Economics prices the ID card system as costing up to £18 billion - £300 for every person in the country.
Sam and Darren are backing the NO2ID campaign (www.no2id.net), opposed to the government's planned ID card and the National Identity Register. NO2ID are also collecting signatures for their pledge to sign up to to refuse to register for an ID card and donate £10 to a legal defence fund - learn more at http://www.pledgebank.com/refuse
Darren Briddock said:
"Public support for ID cards is plummeting. An ICM poll earlier this week showed that it's fallen to 55%, with 43% thinking that ID cards are a bad or very bad idea. People are waking up to what this is going to cost them - not just financially, but in terms of their privacy, their freedom, their very way of life."
"The Government deny the cost will be £300 per person despite this expert report - but of course, it's the same Government that said the Millennium Dome would be a success, there were WMD in Iraq and that they would not introduce student tuition fees!
"The record of this Government in implementing new large computer systems shows there are often huge cost over-runs, delays and failures - from NHS computer systems to the CSA. The national ID card system is a huge gamble with our money, using untested technology, unlikely to make a real difference to our security but with real scope to reduce of rights and civil liberties."
Sam Matthews said,
"These cards will do little to tackle crime or terrorism. Surely the billions of pounds about to be spent by the Labour Government on this scheme would be better spent on putting more police on patrol."
The LSE report predicts that the proposed identity and passport system would cost £12 - £18 billion over ten years. The cost estimates in question were drawn from a leaked section of the LSE's Identity Project, a six-month project into national identity systems, with a specific focus on the UK Identity Card Bill. This project involves a steering group of 14 professors, and a research group of nearly 100 academics, experts, and industry representatives from around the world.
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