The Queen has outlined the 45 government bills that will pass through parliament over the next few months.

The most significant one for IT is the compulsory identity card bill, which was foiled during the last parliament but is now back and has barely changed. I have recorded my opposition to ID cards with full reasons before, so I won't do so again. And I accept that you don't have to agree with me (most don't apparently). But ethical issues aside you might like to consider the magnitude of the IT challenge to introduce biometric ID cards for the entire UK population.

Plenty of would-be suppliers have pound signs in their eyes. Even so, some have been honest enough to say it simply can't be done and this is a project destined for the dustbin of history, in its current form at least.

Certainly the government's record on major IT projects is a sorry and expensive one. It would be a shame to spend an estimated £5.5bn over 10 years on something that can't deliver the promised benefits, wouldn't it?

It is important to understand that the proposed system is for an entitlement and permissions card to give you access to state services and grant you permissions at the behest of the state. You'll be iris scanned at the doctor's surgery because this is the way to ensure you are entitled to state medical care, not because they think you are about to explode.

The much vaunted "security" features to control crime and deal with terrorism are not taken seriously by many experts, who make it clear that the sums involved could be spent to much greater effect elsewhere - by employing tens of thousands of new security agents to infiltrate criminal organisations, for example.

We are unlikely to predict from their data who is about to commit a crime. And those who operate outside the law will remain there whatever technology the rest of us are forced to use.

67.5 million biometric records of gold-standard reliability - your life might depend on it. It will also need to process thousands of transactions per second. It must support biometric input devices in hundreds of thousands of locations.

And all this will have to be done by scaling up from current systems holding, at most, thousands of records. It's a tall order.

There is a further, comprehensive analysis of the IT issues of ID cards on consultant Ovum's web site at the URL below.

A newspaper I read last week suggested that Tony Blair wants to concentrate on the top 20 IT government projects and monitor their progress. However, I don't think he will need to worry about the ID card scheme. My guess is it will be someone still at school and with an unhealthy interest in sixth form politics who will have to deal with the consequences of this scheme if it progresses...