Articles and Speeches

ID Cards Unwelcome
20-Jan-06, Windsor Express Article.
 

It strikes me that if the Government’s ID card bill gets through in its current form, life in Britain will be very different than it is today.

Imagine the scene.

The elderly and disabled will be taken to Government processing centres to have their retinas scanned and their fingerprints taken. They – or the taxpayer – will be presented with a bill for perhaps £300 and, whenever their circumstances change, they will be forced to inform the Government or risk a fine.

The eye-scanning technology is also less reliable with the elderly, people with visual disabilities and those with darker coloured eyes. Surely it cannot be right that these people are inconvenienced with longer delays when at airports, banks and receiving public services.

This is not the kind of country many of us would wish to live in.

So I was delighted this week when the Lords rejected the ID Cards Bill unless the costs were fully revealed and taken into account.

We already have many forms of ID – passports, driving licences, national insurance numbers and bank cards to name a few. It seems to me that if we need to tackle problems with benefit fraud, we should tackle that problem today rather than wait for perhaps 10 years for an unproven technology to be brought into play without any guarantee that it will work.

I very much hope that the ID Cards Bill fails to see the light of day and I will do what I can, with my colleagues, to consign it to the dustbin of history so that we can get on with solving the problems we have without another large-scale failure of a Government-led IT project.