'Five years in, the admitted Home Office costs are over £5 billion – and they're suspiciously silent on fees. Anyone who registers now has been conned into signing away their privacy for life AND giving the government a blank cheque.'

Guy Herbert, NO2ID General Secretary, said:

'Calling ID cards a 'service' is shameless propaganda. There's no other way to try to suggest the ID scheme is either useful or wanted. No one outside Whitehall and its favourite IT firms is going to benefit. But they want us to love Big Brother.'

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) The latest Cost Report should be available from
http://www.ips.gov.uk/identity/publications-legislative.asp

2) Costs prior to 2008 are on record, but a Parliamentary Answer on 21 April 2009 reveals IPS spent £31,923,000 on ID-related consultants in
2008 alone – almost £125,000 PER DAY:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090421/text/90421w0016.htm

3) 'Pilots to boycott ID trial', Manchester Evening News, 5 May 2009:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1113566_pilots_to_boycott_id_trial

4) 'Jacqui Smith says ID cards could be available from high street shops', Times, 6 May 2009:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6229354.ece

5) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.php for a list of
'database state' initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how it all fits together.

For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:

Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839
Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166  

'Since he left the cabinet, Mr Blunkett’s comments on the identity scheme have been variously confused, reckless and wrong.

'His latest addition is to advocate replacing one scheme with another that is almost identical – all under the guise of a U-turn. This is deranged.

'It doesn’t matter what shape it is or what they call it – you will still be interrogated for your personal details; they will still take your fingerprints; and there will still be a database through which the Home Office will track you throughout your life.'

2) As suggested by Sir David Omand in his 'A discussion paper for the ippr Commission on National Security for the 21st Century'

'Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.' - But the Home Office's use of such a super-database is *not* limited to intelligence work - see note 4.

3) NO2ID is a national, non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.php for a list of other 'database state' initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how they fit together.

4) Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Home Secretary's - not a court's - warrant is required to read mail or listen to phone calls. But all the following may authorise themselves to examine communications data for their own purposes:

43 police forces in England & Wales
8 police forces in Scotland
Police Service of Northern Ireland
British Transport Police
Port of Liverpool Police
Port of Dover Police
Royal Military Police
Royal Air Force Police
Civil Nuclear Constabulary
Ministry of Defence Police
Royal Navy Police
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs
Serious Organised Crime Agency
Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency
United Kingdom Border Agency.
The Prison Service

Approximately 474 local authorities throughout the UK.

Approximately 110 *other* public authorities, including
almost all government departments, and
Serious Fraud Office
Independent Police Complaints Commission
Charity Commission
Gambling Commission
Royal Mail
to name only a few.

(source: report of the Chief Surveillance Commissioner
http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0708/hc09/0947/0947.pdf )

For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please
contact:

Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839
Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166

'This is yet another sickening con-trick from an incurably mendacious department. The Home Office is taking advantage of the publicity surrounding a handful of special cases out of millions, to pretend to be limiting the surveillance culture that in fact it is rapidly expanding.

'Who decides when watching you, bugging you, checking who you telephone, and overseeing what you read online are justified? The bureaucrat’s answer is — the same organisations doing the snooping. We don’t need more codes of practice, a different set of boxes to be ticked. We need independent assessment of every surveillance request by a magistrate or judge, who can look at the facts, not just the procedure.'

CSC has been awarded £385 million to "upgrade IPS' application and enrolment system" – which will register applicants for both ID cards and passports – and IBM has been awarded £265 million to "build and run the [biometric] database", which is ultimately intended to hold the fingerprints and facial images of every UK resident over the age of 16.

The pretext is that most expenditure would have to be incurred by changes being made to passports anyway, though UK passports have only recently been changed to meet the standard agreed by the 148 countries in the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The costs claimed for these changes have already hiked the price of a passport from £42 in late 2005 to £72 now [1].

Combined with biographical data held in the DWP's 'Customer Information System' (CIS), the contracts mark the first steps towards the 'National Identity Register' – the set of linked databases at the heart of the ID system. A previous £18 million contract for a temporary ID database was awarded to Thales UK in August 2008, so that the Home Office could meet politically-imposed deadlines for roll-out and avoid embarrassing ministers. Now the contracts are openly being restructured to suit longer-term goals.

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID [2] said:

'Despite knowing that the ID scheme will be scrapped under any change of government, the Home Office is ploughing ahead with its gold-plated white elephant.

'The new style contracts are calculated to obscure exactly what is going on, but the IPS appears to thinks it can lock future governments into its empire-building plans by throwing away the perfectly good passport systems we have.'

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

1) As far back as 2003, "more than half" of the price rise for a standard adult passport from £33 to £42 was claimed to be for "the inclusion in passports of information identifying their owners - microchips containing fingerprints, for example, or pictures of their iris or other facial characteristics" – see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3078483.stm    Further rises – to £51 in December 2005, £66 in October 2006 and £72 in October 2007 – were all justified with similar claims, but this latest announcement implies that the first (hugely costly) generation of ePassports are now to be scrapped. 

2) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.php for a list of 'database state' initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing, and http://www.no2id.net/datasharing for how it all fits together.

For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:

Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net) on 07974 230 839 

Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308

Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166