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Woolly defence of tagging sheep

James Hammerton lays into Charles Clarke and his feeble argument for ID cards in the UK. He unearths some hillarious points, well would be hillarious if not for the topic, about the cost of the wretched scheme:

Take for example benefit fraud. He states:

Moreover, their help in tackling fraud will save tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Some £50 million a year is claimed illegally from the benefits systems using false identities. This money can be far better spent improving schools and hospitals and fighting crime and antisocial behaviour.

However according to the govt’s own regulatory impact assessment (see clause 19):

The current best estimate is that the additional running costs of the new Agency to issue ID cards on a wider basis will be £85m pa when averaged over a ten year period. A further £50m pa is the estimate for the average cost over ten years of the verification service but this would not fall on the individual card holder.

Thus the system is already projected at costing more than twice as much as could possibly be saved from benefit fraud on the govt’s own figures!

James concludes:

At any rate, I’d expect those wishing to fool the system to use the long roll out to study the system and the scanners intently for weaknesses. Given government incompetence, the technical limitations of biometrics and the sheer ambition of what the govt’s attempting, it seems to me quite clear that it’ll be lucky if it makes any positive impact on fighting identity fraud or any other problem the govt has cited at all.

Does this mean we have nothing to worry about? Not quite. Most law abiding people will cooperate with the system, and the system may well thus “work” for this section of the population. Thus law abiding people will find themselves subjected to a licence to live, intrusive surveillance and a bureacracy capable of meddling in just about every area their lives thanks to the card. The criminals and terrorists won’t.

Go and read the whole thing.

2 comments to Woolly defence of tagging sheep

  • What’s further fascinating is if you examine the £50M claim closely it dissolves. It appears to be a guessed 1% of the upper estimate of the total of social security fraud for 2000/1, and was originally offered up by the Home Office as part of a special report on Identity Fraud prepared as softening up for the “entitlement cards” consultation. (They then put forward an upper-middle projection on an estimate of £35M) There are no new figures.

    Recent Parliamentary Answers suggest that there are actually no figures at all. Here’s hansard this week, Frank Dobson being one of our (unlikely?) heros:

    “WORK AND PENSIONS
    Benefit Fraud
    Mr. Dobson: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how
    many cases of benefit fraud involved (a) false identities and (b)
    false claims without false identity in the last year for which
    figures are available; and how many prosecutions there were in each
    category. [207021]

    Mr. Pond: The information is not available.

    Annabelle Ewing: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and
    Pensions what estimate he has made of (a) the cost to his
    Department of identity fraud and (b) the number of people in each
    year since 1997, who have claimed benefits to which they are not
    entitled on the basis of a false identity. [206195]

    Mr. Pond: We estimate that identity related benefit fraud costs the
    Department £50 million per annum. This figure is derived from
    national data produced by the Regional Benefit Review process,
    which by examining a percentage of cases is designed to uncover
    fraud and error in income support and jobseeker’s allowance.

    Information is not available as to how many people have claimed
    benefit on the basis of a false identity”

    So how did they get the £50M that is the purported justification of policy? Here’s my guess:

    HOME OFFICE: We need a figure for social security identity fraud.
    WORK AND PENSIONS: We don’t have any figures
    HO: Give us an estimate then. What’s the most it could be?
    DWP: Well we usually estimate social security fraud as between £2Bn and £5Bn a year. I’ve never heard of a case of identity fraud, but there must be some, I suppose. No more than 1%, though.

    ….

    It’s not clear how ID cards would affect a fraud of which there are no examples in captivity. What is clear is that the HO estimates of the set-up and running costs of the scheme only cover its own costs. There has been no attempt to estimate what the scanners, secure infrastructure and software modification (and of maintaining the same) will cost for the thosands of DHSS offices across the country if ID cards are somehow to be used for this purpose. More than the phantom £50M a year that it is supposed to save? Probably.

  • If the data is stored digitally it can be copied, altered or corrupted,all that would happen is,as with cash machines,the system would be declared infallible.
    This of course would mean that fraud could be declared to be eliminated.Neat!