Really? Lets think about it.
* First up we gotta biometrically scan every citizen of the United Kingdom for starters. That's 64 million people.
- Scanners
- Appointment Management
- Advertising Campaigns (to remind people to register/go)
- Chasing people who aren't registered
* Then for that to make sense you need to be able to validate people in places.
- Invest in technology to biometrically match people (readers etc)
- Train users/operators
- Handle the kinks in that tech (complaints, false positives).
- Handle any legal issues.
- Create the back end system to auth (somewhat non trivial)
- Load balance
- Security Checks, Penetration testing, etc, etc. No point in the whole system if its easily spoofed, right?
Then of course we need to produce the cards and send all the cards to those 64 million people. Also this system is supposed to integrate with existing government systems. You can imagine what I nightmare that probably was going to be.
My point being that its only a database and some photocards in the sense that I can write Stackoverflow in a weekend ;).
Tbh your belief that it was only photocards means that you probably didn't appreciate the full scope of the legislation. It actually sickened me how the entire focus of the debate on the ID system was on the cards when they were the least important aspect of it.
If I wore a tin-foil hat i'd even go so far as to suggest that politicians intentionally focused on the card part of it to divert our attention from the rest of it.