By Nick Heath, 25 September 2008 16:28
NEWS
The UK will produce up to one million ID cards for foreign nationals every year, according to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
Smith was speaking at an event in London today where she revealed the design of the card for the first time.
Foreign nationals, including children of all ages, will be issued cards from 25 November and will need to produce them in order to get easier access to services including non-emergency healthcare.
Some 50,000 of the cards will be produced for foreign nationals by the UK Border Agency until next March, with private contractors starting to produce cards for parts of the UK population from 2009.
The first foreign nationals to get the cards will be "people applying for a right to study in the UK" and "people applying for marriage visas" - the two categories that most frequently abuse their terms of residence, Smith said.
This will gradually be increased to all categories of foreign nationals and by 2015 the Home Office expects 90 per cent of foreign residents to have an ID card.
The Home Office is trialling fingerprint enrolment for foreign nationals and has taken 12,000 fingerprints to date, which the Home Secretary said has resulted in four convictions and "a lot of examples of ID switches".
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Smith said: "We want to be able to prevent those who are here illegally from benefiting from the privileges of Britain and for business to be confident that those they are employing and take onto courses are who they say they are.
"We all want to see our borders more secure and human trafficking, benefit fraud and immigration crime tackled."
Foreign nationals face a fine of up to £1,000 for not submitting to biometric scans for the cards.
ID cards are not yet intended to be compulsory for most UK citizens however and will not be issued to Britons under the age of 16.
The card for foreign nationals will be pink and blue with the royal crest on the front and will hold eight pieces of information including two fingerprints and a scan of a facial photo which will be stored on the chip. It is printed with details of a person's name, date and place of birth, sex, nationality, a card expiry date, place and date of issue, type of permit and remarks.
The card for UK citizens will carry a different design, however.
Smith insisted the Home Office is making good progress in talks with airport operators and unions about airside workers in airports being among the "trusted workers" first in line for the cards in 2009.
Smith said: "Airport workers already face a great deal more checks than is needed for an ID card. It is something they are already used to.
"I expect to be able to issue the cards to British citizens working in UK airports next year."
Smith's comments contradict the stance taken by the UK airlines trade group, British Air Transport Association.
A spokesman for the organisation said: "We do not see any benefits of the scheme and we will continue to oppose it unless some concrete benefit is put forward."
Smith said she believes the £30 cards will be popular and there will be little resistance when the cards are made voluntarily available to British people in 2011.
"There will be a lot of people wanting to take them up," she added.
Smith acknowledged there would be groups of people unable or unwilling to have a biometric ID card - such as the four million elderly people who won't be able to provide a clear fingerprint, according to the Biometrics Assurance Group - but insisted the scheme did not need 100 per cent take up to be effective.
"Because it is so exceptional, it is not going to be a problem that undermines the entire scheme," she said.
Smith attacked the Conservatives for their plans to drop ID cards, saying they were "turning their backs on the protection of our borders", adding such a move would save very little money as 80 per cent of the estimated £4.7bn cost of the scheme is tied into production of biometric ePassports. More than 12.5 million of the first generation biometric ePassports have been issued in the last two years.
Comments
There are 9 comments. Join the discussion
1. drew stephenson
Sorry, did she really say that 4 million elderly people is an "exceptional" situation? That would be 4 million out of a total population of about 65 million?
Doesn't sound that exceptional to me.
Furthermore, if airport workers are already going through more checks than is required for an id card, what's the point?
2. Jeremy Wickins
Four million people constitutes "exceptional"? Well, it is a bit less than ten percent of the population, so maybe it is all in the interpretation. But start to add some disabled people, certain ethic groups, pregnant women, people with certain professions, and this figure rapidly starts to rise to levels that even the government must regard as significant!(though I must make it clear that I do not regard four million exceptions as insignificant)
3. Richard
Will it cope with foreign names?
The "test document" seems to show a simple single "forename" + "surname."
As these cards are being forced (first) on "foreigners" will they and the database be able to cope with the different format of many foreign names?
4. anonymous
"There will be a lot of people wanting to take them up"...
...more like a lot of people "having" to take them up. She's already said foreign nationals will need them to get access to certain services. This is just the start of a horrible future restrictive society.
Segregating different groups with different coloured cards is very worrying.
5. Karen Challinor
if ministers think 6% is insignificant then this goes some way towards explaining why we are in a recession at the moment
the card is a revenue stream pure and simple
at £30 a pop and 1 million rolled out a year that makes £30m in the treasury coffers for a glorified car window scraper and all for an estimated cost of £5bn, bargain!
then there will be the marketing information to be sold to interested third parties as it gets used at point of sale to prove the person actually owns the credit card they present
and of course tracking information to be datamined for "undesirable" behaviour
just a hypothetical prediction here but I think it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for someone somewhere to develop a cheap RFID datalogger that can be installed in lampposts, run off solar power and read by readers in passing cars but this would of course require the cards to be carried compulsorily
naaah they wouldn't do that to us would they
6. Karen Challinor
and another hypothetical for you
a person enters the country legally, is issued with an ID card and their details are entered on to the database
at the same time a person enters the country illegally and no ID is taken, and please don't tell me this cannot happen
they are both later asked for their ID in a situation where they may reasonably be expected to produce it
the legal and honest person produces their ID verifies their fingerprint and all is hunky dory and they are let loose
the illegal and dishonest person says "I was born here" produces some household bills provided by a friend who has never been fingerprinted along with their life history, submits their fingerprint which isn't on file so the assumption is they are telling the truth and they are let loose, only now their fingerprint is on file, as a UK national, so any subsequent checks will get them back on the street a bit faster
tell me please, exactly what the point of this scheme is again ?
unless ultimately everyone is required to be on the NIR and carry their ID card at all times, to be presented and checked at random stop and search requests by anyone in authority
if thats the case then the bad guys have already won
7. anonymous
What sort of ID will I have to present to collect my ID card ... and why wasn't that good enough in the first place??
8. Chris Tolmie
One day we will all be forced to carry and produce - even for buying a loaf of bread - and the government does not seem to see that as inevitable. All we can do is peacefully resist, and when we do feel the need to carry it - keep it stored in a metal lined wallet so that it cannot be read while in your pocket. Actually, we should do that with our passports right now.
9. Guy Herbert
Blunkett Blair and Clarke used to say that 70% of the cost of the scheme was accounted for by passport costs (the plan being to enrol 70% of the population through passport applications); now Smith says it is 80%. What's changed?