Acccording to the London School of Ecomomic’s upper estimate the ID scheme will cost £19.2 billion to set up over its first ten years [see http://identityproject.lse.ac.uk/ for full report and latest information].
The Home Office – while keeping all its workings secret – has admitted that its estimate doesn’t account for the cost to other government departments, public bodies, businesses, banks and employers who will have to absorb the cost of integrating ID checks into their systems and processes – which could easily top another £10bn or more. All these additional costs will either be picked up by the taxpayer (i.e. you) or passed onto the consumer (i.e. you).
The direct cost to the individual will be far greater than the "£93" that the government says it will charge you for a passport and ID card ‘package’ (ID registration will be compulsory when you apply for or renew your passport), or "£30" ‘standalone’ card.
If you lose your card or it is stolen you will have to pay for a replacement. If any detail on the card or your record is incorrect you will have to pay to get it changed – or be fined £1000. You will have to pay to be re-issued a card every 10 years, and will bear the cost of travelling to your nearest ‘enrolment’ centre to be fingerprinted or have your eyes scanned. Every time your details are checked against the ID database, the government will make a charge – which will, inevitably, be passed on to you.
Current government statements and requests for supplier ‘expressions of interest’ put the cost of setting up the ‘National Identity Scheme’ (which now explicitly includes biometric visas & eBorders) at £7.5 billion, up from the £1.3 – 3.1bn it was originally supposed to cost. The Home Office admits to having spent over £72 million already, and it hasn’t yet issued a single ‘ID card’ contract or specification.

Research in Europe shows that in countries where ID cards exist, people from ethnic minorities are much more likely to stopped by police and asked to produce their card.

The government in general and the Home Office in particular, have an appalling track record when it comes to large-scale IT projects. New systems at the Post Office, Passport Office, Probation Service, Police Service, Courts Service and Child Support Agency have all run massively over budget. The ID cards scheme would be the most ambitious and expensive public sector IT project ever undertaken. It has all the hallmarks of a disaster waiting to happen: no-one has spelt out what the cards are for and how they will achieve their objectives; it has been proposed in response to political events (notably 9/11) rather than a sober assessment of costs and benefits; building the system is complex and massively expensive; the cost estimates are vague and incomplete; and the project is reliant on new and untested technology

This means the government can get away with expanding the uses of the card and lowering the safeguards on data sharing. The relationship between the state and the citizen is not properly defined in law. Every other country that has a system of compulsory identity cards also has a written constitution. We will be passing a law on the understanding that this government will not use the system to spy on its citizens or restrict civil liberties – even if that were is true, can we be so trusting of future governments?
The identity register will hold only basic details, but it will include a record of every time the individual uses the card, quickly building up an accurate picture of our lives which will be available to the government in a range of circumstances. This means that a future government could easily use the scheme to monitor individuals or specific groups, and restrict their entitlement to services. The Bill also allows the Home Secretary to expand the scope of the register by order. This is open to abuse. When ID cards were introduced in 1939 it was for 3 stated purposes: conscription, national security and rationing. By 1950, an audit found that this had expanded to 39 stated purposes. The risk of ‘function creep’ is very real

As has been the experience in the US (where they use the SSID) and Australia (where they use the tax number), using a single ID number for a whole range of transactions actually increases ‘identity fraud’. Criminals are more easily able to discover and link together seperate pieces of information, facilitiating fraud and eroding privacy.
The card itself is only the tip of the iceberg. A single number (the ‘National Identity Register Number’ or NIRN) will, over time, be used to index and link together every record that the government – and potentially others – hold on you. Every use (when, where, with whom) of your card or check on the ID database will be recorded, creating an unprecedentedly detailed picture of your life.

The men responsible for the Madrids bombings all carried valid ID cards. Those who murdered fifty-two innocent people in London on the 7th July 2005 made an attempt to save their identities; they wanted to hide their intent. Even the Home Secretary who pioneerd this sceme, David Blunkett, has admitted that ID cards will not stop a determined terrorist.
The proposed mechanism to ‘stop terrorism’ through the use of ID cards is obscure and illogical – not that dissimilar to that which suggests that increased surveillance will decrease crime, yet British crime rates remain rather high as compared to our European counterparts, who are not photographed quite so often on a daily basis. The idea that ID cards and a biometric database are a reliable means of storing data is completely flawed – nothing is "forgery-proof", as criminal organisations will so kindly demonstrate once the cards are inevitably issued. Once a means of forgery has been developed, the cards will be rendered an expensive and entirely useless exercise in data collection, and a prospective ‘terrorist’ may change his identity at will. It is also worth noting that many people hold dual identities for entirely innocuous reasons – women who keep their maiden names for business purposes, for example, or perhaps transgender individuals, both of whom are living within the law. ID cards will only serve to render these people as ‘suspicious’ individuals.
As for monitoring football hooligans more efficiently, the purpose of passports is to serve as a travel document, and a highly expensive ID card operation does not seem to be a method of improving upon this efficiently.

Your National Identity Register entry will have over fifty pieces of information about you. Government officials in numerous different departments will have acces to it. So will employess of the private forms the government will pay manage the information

Another way of restricting our freedom of movement and choice People are getting fed up with us living in a NANNY STATE.
Allowing the governement to fingerprint and monitor us in this way severely restricts our freedom of movement. Also, do we trust our government with this information? I don’t want George Bush getting his hands on my personal details!!

Unlike other European cards the UK does not require it’s citizens to carry ID cards or indeed to prove their ID when asked by police officer on the street. The situation is different in countries such as Germany, where the relationship between the citizen and the state, legally, is different.
Such an imposition is likely to cause a backlash against the the government and the ID card scheme as a whole.