ID CARDS

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The UK's ID card scheme will cost £5.4bn to set up and run over the next 10 years. Home office minister Liam Byrne confirmed ID cards would be introduced "rapidly", starting with biometric cards, which include fingerprints and facial images, for foreign nationals in 2008.

He said, "Illegal working will become far more difficult as the National Identity Scheme is rolled out. Any employer would be able to check a person's unique reference number against registered information about their identity to find out whether someone is eligible to work in the UK."

He added, "ID cards will give us a powerful tool to combat identity fraud which underpins organised crime, terrorism and abuse of the immigration system. ID cards will also help transform the delivery of public services to the citizen, making interactions swifter, more reliable and more secure and helping to reduce costs by eliminating wasteful duplication of effort." (Source: BBC News, Oct/06)

Plans to incorporate an ID card into passports or driving licences have been scrapped by the Home Office. Instead, everyone over the age of 18 will have to have a separate, wallet-sized pass. The estimated price-tag of £35 means that with £73 for a passport and £38 for a provisional driving licence, a full set of identification will set Brits back £146. This is on top of the £3billion cost to the taxpayer to introduce the national ID scheme, which involves putting scanners in hospitals, job centres, airports and universities.

A Home Office spokesman said the decision to have a separate ID card was taken so people could have a handy pass to carry around rather than their passport. But Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said, "The cost to the public seems to escalate with every announcement. The Government would be much better off spending the £3billion for ID cards on getting more police on to our streets and ensuring the intelligence services are properly resourced to tackle terrorism."

Home Secretary David Blunkett said the cards would leave an "audit trail", meaning a record will be kept every time a person's ID is scanned. He added, "Our plans to bring in a national ID card scheme lie at the heart of our work to ensure that the UK can meet the challenges of a changing world. This is a long-term project and we are determined to get it right." Spy chiefs will be able to track people by monitoring where and when cards are used.

The Home Office said the security services would be the only people with access to the system. In a package of refinements to the controversial proposals, Mr Blunkett said the scheme will be run by a single agency attached to the Home Office. New cards will include biometric details of each cardholder, such as their fingerprints, an electronic scan of their face or a scan of the iris of their eye.

These unique features will be compared against records held on a National Identity Register, theoretically making the cards impossible to forge. The Government believes the cards will help combat illegal immigration and working, terrorism and identity fraud. MPs are expected to vote on the scheme in the next few months. The identity passes will be brought in within three years.

Identity cards were dismissed by Harold Wilson's Labour government as expensive and ineffective and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins also feared the cards would infringe civil liberties. Current Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke has dismissed fears the cards would create a "Big Brother" state. The ID card plan came into focus in November 1974, after IRA pub bombings in Birmingham killed 21 people.

Ministers were under pressure to act and Mr Jenkins was given the task of drawing up the emergency Prevention of Terrorism Bill. But in a frank memo to cabinet colleagues he admitted there was a limit to what such measures could achieve and he issued a sharp warning against responding to the terrorist attacks by adopting ever more draconian legislation. "It goes almost without saying that we must guard against the danger of being driven to more and more extreme measures involving unwarranted infringement of personal liberty," he wrote.

In the memorandum, dated 24 November, three days after the bombings, Mr Jenkins acknowledged that the government had to be seen to take some action. In particular, he was conscious of the need to avert reprisal attacks against innocent Irish people in Britain. He said, "We are in greater danger of justifiable criticism if we do too little than if we do too much. We must, moreover, take action which is firm enough to pre-empt action by self-appointed vigilantes."

One proposal considered by Mr Jenkins was new restrictions on travel between Ireland and the British mainland, but he quickly concluded that a system of "watertight control" was "not practicable". "Nor do I see advantage in a system of identity cards, which apart from creating difficulties for ordinary people would be extremely expensive and largely ineffective," he wrote. Instead, he opted for the introduction of spot checks on travellers, a system of exclusion orders banning terrorist suspects from the mainland and making IRA membership illegal.

A computer system to run the Government's ID card scheme has been scrapped. Home Secretary John Reid insisted the decision was not a U-turn. He said, "Doing something sensible isn't necessarily a U-turn. We have decided it is lower risk, more efficient, and faster to use what already exists, although the data will be drawn from other sources." Ministers wanted to build a National Identity Register costing several billion to avoid the mistakes and duplications that plagued other computer projects. Mr Reid said using databases at the Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions and Passport Service, would save money, boost efficiency and cut fraud. (Source: Daily Mirror, Dec/06)