Labour will force everyone to give fingerprints at ID card interview centres
Patrick Hennessy writes in the Sunday Telegraph:
Ministers plan to force all adults to travel miles at their own expense to fingerprint scanning units so their details can go onto an identity card database. From 2009, everyone will have to attend one of 69 “interview centres”, whose locations are revealed today for the first time.
People without their own transport, such as the elderly and the less well off, will be hit hardest by having to make round trips that in some cases will be more than 100 miles. Somebody living in Cambridge would be forced to make a 62-mile round trip to Bury St Edmunds, while people in Blackpool would have to travel 54 miles to Blackburn and back. In Stranraer, residents face a 128-mile round trip to Kilmarnock.
The revelations are the latest blow for the Government’s crisis-hit ID card scheme. Ministers claim the scheme, which will see the first cards issued in two years’ time, will cost £5.4 billion, although experts at the London School of Economics say the total bill could be £19.3 billion.
February 19th, 2007 at 22:35
1. The UK has over seven times as much land as the Netherlands and over three-and-a-half times as many people, and yet the Netherlands are proposing to have 4,200 registration centres [1]. Italy has about 58m people and issues ID cards from 8,101 comuni nationwide [2]. Our 69 centres really do look like a bit of an under-provision.
2. The government have promised several times that our personal data will be held securely. But then in the October 2006 Section 37 report[3], they said they might consider selling our data to bankers and retailers. An interesting approach to holding it securely.
3. Mark Ballard writing in The Register last week reveals plans for EU police forces to share biometric data[4]. I had always imagined that holding data securely was a rather solitary matter, quiet and withdrawn from the hurly-burly of the outside world but the way our government go about it, it sounds more like Carnival in Rio.
1. http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/88_630_file.pdf — see para. 4.1
2. http://www.guidacomuni.it/
3. http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/costreport37.pdf — see page 8
4. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/16/prum_promoted/
February 20th, 2007 at 17:39
Within my own country of Buckinghamshire, from the County Council’s website: “You can register a birth by appointment at the Register Office in the area in which the birth occurred. We also hold registration sessions in Buckingham, Wendover, Wing, Ivinghoe, Winslow and Haddenham, Amersham, Beaconsfield, Chesham, Marlow and Princes Risborough.” [Then there's Milton Keynes, a separate unitary authority, with its own registratio sites too.]
So why not passport interviews in the same places, by appointment on particular days at each location (to make it more efficient).
Joined-up government: where?
Best regards
February 22nd, 2007 at 13:41
Why are we quibbling over details such as this? I will never carry an ID card. I refuse to attend one of these centres and will renounce my nationality before I ever do so. What are you proposing to do about closing down these disgusting ‘interrogation’ centres before they get their 1939 census?