A damning independent report should be the final nail in the coffin for Labour's identity card proposals, Harlow Liberal Democrats said today.

The report, by a panel of 14 professors at the London School of Economics, concludes that the current scheme is "neither safe nor appropriate", and will cost two, three or even four times as much as the government estimates.

In advance of tomorrow's Commons debate on the government's identity card bill, Harlow's Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate at the recent election, Lorna Spenceley, said the bill should be scrapped.

"It can't be right to charge residents as much as £300 for a card which won't deliver the benefits the government claims", she said.

"But the problems are not limited to cost - there are technical and administrative issues too, as well as some very fundamental questions about our civil liberties. This is a dangerous and costly bill and must be stopped."

The LSE report into the government's ID card proposals highlights ten areas of concern: cost, renewing the biometric testing, replacing ID cards, enrolling difficulties, difficulties with card reader machines, non-cooperation from the public, civil liberty, privacy and legal implications, problems for disabled users, security concerns and the creation of a new offence of identity theft.

The authors say that "successful identity theft of a person's biometric data would mean that their fingerprints or iris scans are permanently in the hands of criminals, with little hope of revoking them." At the report's launch, one professor called the system a "one-stop shop for fraudsters".