By Steve Ranger, 18 April 2005 12:10
NEWS Liberal Democrats have unveiled plans to scrap biometric ID cards and instead spend the money on speech recognition-enabled handheld computers for the police.
The Liberal Democrats calculate that scrapping ID cards will save £500m, and want to spend the money on more police and technology to help officers spend more time on the beat, if they win the general election.
The party said that out of an officer's average eight-hour shift, only 90 minutes will be spent on the beat, with the rest taken up with form-filling.
"The priority should be to get the police as mobile as possible," a Liberal Democrat spokesman told silicon.com.
The party said that if elected it will give police an extra £150m in the first year of the parliament to boost existing IT budgets.
It wants to give officers handheld computers connected to the Airwave network, equipped with speech recognition technology already in use in hospitals, to help officers fill in forms on the move.
"The NHS is increasingly using this [speech recognition] and it seems to us to be the sort of thing that could be a great help to the police," he added.
The party said it would also improve on the "disastrous procurements" that have dogged police IT, and also speed up key national technology projects such as the case and custody system, which will allow police and prosecution teams to share case files electronically.
The rollout of the £2.9bn Airwave police radio communications system has been completed to all forces in England, Scotland and Wales on time and on budget. Developing Airwave to offer more data services is already part of the plans set out by the Police IT Organisation.
Comments
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1. Frank Dreyer
Sounds like a much better idea!
Give the police more power to fight criminals efficiently, but with tools that does not reduce the 'civic liberty' of the WHOLE british population by introducing the costly and risky biometric ID cards !
I'm not against ID-cards as such, and Biometric ID cards or Passports do not particularly endanger civic rights under a normal democratic government. BUT, if a democratic state like ours should suddenly become totalitarian, which has happened in the past and will happen in the future, the system would present absolute danger to the people.
One must never forget that the danger from which we try to protect ourselves can just as easily come from inside a country as from the outside. And the more we lock ourselves into a system, the more the security-risk will come from the system itself.
With a biometric ID-system, as presented by Mr Blair, we would be pretty defenseless if the State became our worst enemy.
2. anonymous
National ID databases should be destroyable in the event of a totalitarian takeover.
Possibilities are say 9 "guardians", of whom any 5 can vote (electronically & remotely)to destroy it. The guardians would be known only to each other, and vacancies would be appointed by the remaining guardians.
I'm sure there are many flaws in this, but it could be developed.
3. Guy Herbert
Or revise the PACE and CPS guidelines and remove some form filling from the system. Fractionally more police time spent doing the things that most people think they do might work wonders without extra funding or wizzy technology. (In police authority hands the latter will end up with specifications that are hoelessly bad, and training likewise.)
Rather than create some new problems why not fix some well understood ones? Too boring to be politically useful?
4. anonymous
Is the 'state' in the shape of 'New Labour', quite a long way down the road toward a 'totalitarian state' already. With their seemingly obsessive control freak-ery, prying, anti privacy, dictatorial attitudes???