Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has promised that the price of ID Cards will be kept under £30 but it looks almost certain that the final bill is set to increase according to a bi-annual report published on Tuesday.
The cost of setting up the National ID project for the next ten years will rise from £245m to £335m, a 37 percent, partly due to the fact that a faster rollout is envisaged by 2012.
The overall cost of the decade-long rollout has been shaved by almost a billion pounds, falling to £4.57bn; due partly to the fact that private companies will be involved and the passport-renewal system has been streamlined.
The report also highlighted that the production and delivery of the ID cards and passports would account for two fifths of the project's costs with a regional office network, the business and programme management and the technology infrastructure roughly counting for one sixth of the total expenditures each.
However, some, like the Register, have been very critical of the ID Scheme pointing to the fact that the cost reduction came through "creative accounting and merrily chucking biometrics off into the middle distance in the hope that somebody will catch", a belief that anti identity card scheme group No2ID firmly backs as well.
The cost of setting up the National ID project for the next ten years will rise from £245m to £335m, a 37 percent, partly due to the fact that a faster rollout is envisaged by 2012.
The overall cost of the decade-long rollout has been shaved by almost a billion pounds, falling to £4.57bn; due partly to the fact that private companies will be involved and the passport-renewal system has been streamlined.
The report also highlighted that the production and delivery of the ID cards and passports would account for two fifths of the project's costs with a regional office network, the business and programme management and the technology infrastructure roughly counting for one sixth of the total expenditures each.
However, some, like the Register, have been very critical of the ID Scheme pointing to the fact that the cost reduction came through "creative accounting and merrily chucking biometrics off into the middle distance in the hope that somebody will catch", a belief that anti identity card scheme group No2ID firmly backs as well.
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