24 Sep 2008

The Home Office’s anticipated announcement that ID cards will be compulsory for foreign nationals by November 2008 seeks to soften the public before making ID cards compulsory for all British nationals, Liberty warned.

The £5.6 billion compulsory ID card scheme was unsuccessfully touted by the Government as a solution to identity theft, benefit fraud, crime, and terrorism, but is now being rolled out gradually to targeted groups such as foreign nationals, students and airport workers.

Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti said:

“This week the Prime Minister said he doesn’t do PR but clearly the Home Secretary wasn’t listening. The public will yawn at yet another re-launch of this scheme and if the card came with loyalty points, we still wouldn’t buy it. Picking on foreigners first is divisive politics; as costly to our race relations as our purses.”

Liberty noted that the Government’s plan to require all non-EU nationals to carry ID cards by November 2008 was actually introduced through the UK Borders Act last year rather than the Identity Cards Act.

The Home Office has said that from November 2008 biometric identity cards will be compulsory for foreign nationals who come to the UK to work and study. Within the next three years, all new applicants arriving in the UK will be issued with a card. From 2009, ID cards will be issued to up to 200,000 airport workers. ID cards will be available to young people on a voluntary basis from early 2010 and available to the general public in late 2010. In 2011 all new passports will be entered on the National Identity Register either through ID cards or biometric passports. The Home Office intends to roll out compulsory ID cards through Britain by 2017.

Liberty expressed concern about the Government’s ability to safeguard individual’s intimate details on the National Identity Register after Government departments last year lost millions of people’s personal details, including those of 25 million child benefit claimants. A YouGov poll commissioned by the human rights group in September 2007 found that only 17 percent of Britons trust the authorities to keep their personal details completely confidential while 57 percent believe the UK has become a ‘surveillance society.’

Contact: Liberty press office on 020 7378 3656 or 07973 831 128

Notes to Editors


Liberty’s principle concerns about the ID cards and the National ID Register include:
 
- They will fundamentally change the relationship between individual and state.

- They will have a detrimental impact on race relations and will adversely affect vulnerable groups in society.

- They will intrude on privacy as the amount of information held on the database and the uses made of that information will increase dramatically.

- The Government’s poor record on IT projects makes this a huge financial risk.


Liberty does not accept that ID cards will have any particular benefit:

- They will have no impact on illegal immigration as asylum seekers have been required to carry ID cards since 2000.

- Arguments that they will protect the UK from terrorist attack are unconvincing. The men responsible for the 9/11 and Madrid terrorist attacks had valid identification.

- They will not help fight crime but will be counterproductive, as they will deflect financial and policing resources away from crime prevention and detection.

- They will have minimal impact on benefit fraud, as this is usually about financial circumstances rather than identity.

- Most identity fraud takes place remotely, online, over the phone or using false ‘seed’ documents (driving licences, passports and so on). Identity cards will not address this.