Sarah Arnott, writing in Computing, reviews the state of the Home Office ID cards project, and is not encouraged:
The national ID cards scheme is one of the largest, most ambitious IT programmes ever attempted. Yet it is ignoring just about every lesson that should have been learned from the past.
It lacks clear aims; it has [...]

The BBC reports on a loan shark charging 8,000% interest, who was recently sentenced:
The court heard on Tuesday Johnson took social security benefit books or National Insurance numbers as security for the unauthorised loans and piled default charges on to his clients for missed payments.
This is a pretty common way that vulnerable people are taken [...]

John Lettice of The Register has been trawling through the long list of ID-card-related parliamentary written questions answered (or in some cases, not answered) by ministers over the last couple of weeks, and has come to some interesting conclusions, such as:
The Government last week confirmed that the UK’s planned ID card is intended to operate [...]

Andy McCue writes in Silicon.com about the so-far uncounted cost of modifying existing government IT systems to support ID cards:
The Home Office claims in its own benefits overview report that many of the strategic benefits of the ID card scheme will derive from the use of a unique Identity Registration Number (IRN) “unequivocally linked to [...]

Kable has a piece on Brian Gladman’s analysis of ID card costings, whose main conclusion is:
the government’s cost and benefit figures suggest that in the very best case taxpayers will have to wait 14 years to get any positive net return on their investment in the proposed UKIVS [UK Identity Verification System]. In [...]