(Only a)£2 billion defect on ID cards!

From those bleeding-heart civil libertarians at Computer Weekly:

The government's £5.8bn ID card project will be more than £1.81bn in deficit by 2008 unless the Home Office finds additional funding, a report by the London School of Economics (LSE) has claimed.

From the first page of the actual report:

Taking into consideration the

• £93 fee for passport and ID card,
  
• costs of potential verifications against the National Identity Register;
  
• estimated benefits arising from a national identity scheme for the Home Office,
  

we found that the Home Office accounts will have an estimated £1.81 billion cumulative deficit by 2018 for the combined passport-ID scheme. The Home Secretary has referred to such deficits as 'a small contribution from public funds, which is the only amount that could be spent on other things'.

These figures seem to indicate a number of problems still exist.

• There are still no reliable figures for enrolment rates.
  
• Significant benefits of the scheme will not begin to be realised for many years.
  
• The Home Office will probably have to raise the costs of the combined passport and ID card to break even.
  
• Alternatively, to maintain a sustainable scheme, the Home Office ID Card Team will have to greatly increase the number and/or cost of verifications beyond current projections and/or impose significant accreditation charges on private companies and other organisations wishing to use the Register.
  
• The deficit will likely hamper the development of other Home Office programmes [which may be a good thing!].
  

Finally we suggest that the process of combining the ID and passport for the purpose of accounting does not prove to be beneficial to either programme. Indeed if the Home Office insists on the biometric passport but drops the compulsory issuance of the ID Card, this could free up £1.8bn for other programmes over the next ten years.

While the conclusion states:

Based on the figures offered by the Home Office Identity Card Team, the Home Office is likely to be subject to an operating deficit due to the Identity Card Scheme. To make ends meet under the current scheme, the Home Office will need to either increase the fee for the passport and card, designate further documents for necessary registration on the NIR, or charge other Government departments and the private sector greater fees for verifications against the NIR.

[I]f the Home Office insists on the biometric passport it has planned but drops the compulsory issuance of the ID Card, this could free up £1.82bn for other programmes over the next ten years.

How long until the government launches a new smear campaign against the LSE & the authors of the report?