Home Office minister to take part in ID card webchat
According to the Manchester Evening News:
Following the launch of the goverment’s ID card scheme in Manchester, Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier will be taking part in a webchat to answer your questions.
Meg Hillier will be online here at 2pm Monday November 23 for a live discussion about how the introduction of the ID card scheme is going. You can join the webchat live, or you can email questions to Meg Hillier: website@men-news.co.uk.
November 23rd, 2009 at 15:13
I’ve just read the transcript of the webchat and there wasn’t anything there that hadsn’t already been said before. The questions weren’t challenging in any way, the responses just reiterating the current PR sound bites. A poor performance from the junior minister. They did run a survey: Would you get an ID card? Result: 96% no, 4% yes.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:01
I was in the web chat and although I must have typed in at least 8 questions, only one made it through after 44 minutes, and it was the least challenging one; relating to what are the success criteria for the pilot?
Having been back to the site today I can see other people stating basically the same thing.
The interesting bits for me were the announcements that:
1) Manchester is no longer considered a trial, it is being treated as the first wave in a project that is basically live nationally.
2) ID cards will be funded entirely from the charges made to obtain them (although she didn’t detail how many cards would have to be sold to achieve this).
That and the usual guff that the ID card database will be secure and not available to anyone except under extenuating circumstances; presumably this is because the government’s bid to share all data under clause 152 in the Coroners and Justice Bill has already been quashed. So more of a “till next time” really.
The other interesting bit of information was as Dave stated above, the 96% NO vote. We may not have achieved much with our questions (those that made it through), but at least we stopped the government being able to use this webchat in their future PR (probably)