The Home Office seems to have quietly announced a policy of not enforcing parts of the Identity Cards Act 2006.

Tom Espiner writes on the ZDnet web site:

[Phil] Booth said that once people have signed up to the National Identity Register, they have a legal obligation under the Identity Cards Act to update information — such as change-of-address — for the rest of their lives, or face fines of up to £1,000.

The Home Office spokesman said that while people have a legal obligation to update their details, the Home Office will not enforce the penalties if the owners no longer carry the card.

“Our policy is clear that we will not enforce the requirement to update personal information if you have returned your card to cancel it, or you report it lost or stolen, and inform us you do not wish to renew it,” said the spokesman.

According to the Home Office’s Code of Practice on Civil Penalties, written in late September:

1.3. The Act lays out the legal duty of the Secretary of State to maintain a “secure and reliable record of registrable facts”. Ensuring the facts that are held on the National Identity Register (the “Register”) are accurate is an essential element of this duty and the civil penalty regime is in place to support this by enforcing the obligation of those who are on the Register to keep Register entries up to date and to surrender an identity card if required to do so.

and

1.6. It is very important that card holders are aware of the importance of these obligations and the civil penalty regime will act as a strong encouragement to comply and will ensure that it is possible to penalise anyone who flaunts [sic] the law. It is already a requirement by law for holders of driving licences to notify changes of name or address and that requirement is enforced through a criminal, as opposed to a civil, penalty.

1.7. It should be noted that persons may be issued with further civil penalties if they continue fail to comply with a requirement (see paragraph 3.5), even if they have paid the civil debt.

and

2.2. Section 10(7) Failure by an individual to whom a card has been issued to notify the Secretary of State of prescribed changes of circumstances which affect the information held on the Register, or of errors in that information of which the cardholder is aware: maximum penalty £1,000.

But deep in the code there’s also this one-sentence note:

2.16. If a person has voluntarily surrendered their identity card, by formally returning it to the Secretary of State, a civil penalty will not normally be issued in the case of failure to comply with maintenance requirements.

This entry was posted by andrew on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 23:45 and is filed under General, Neutral, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.