Blair slams ID cards critics

Prime Minister Tony Blair has again hit out at critics of the government's controversial ID cards scheme, arguing that biometric technology is crucial for fighting crime and securing the UK's borders.

Speaking at his monthly Downing Street press conference, Blair said the argument is about "modernity" and not civil liberties.

He said: "In the end we have a modern world that we are living in that has new and different types of crime. If we do not use technology in order to combat it, then we will not be fighting crime effectively."

Blair said the National Identity Register (NIR) and biometric ID cards will also tackle identity theft and make it easier for people to prove their identity when opening bank accounts and applying for mortgages and the like.

He added: "At the moment the enterprising criminal has it fairly easy. Searching through the rubbish can provide the person with all that they need to steal an identity but forging an ID card and a matching biometric record will obviously be quite another matter."

Blair said ID cards will boost the crime detection rate by allowing police to compare almost one million outstanding crime scene fingerprints against those held centrally on the NIR.

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From 2008, ID cards will be compulsory for non-EU nationals living in the UK for more than three months but Blair said ID cards will not now be issued to British citizens until 2009 at the earliest.

The Home Office is due to produce an "action plan" in December about how different government departments will use ID cards and the identity database. Last month it published the latest cost estimate of the scheme, claiming ID cards will cost £5.4bn to set up and run over the next 10 years.

But the Conservatives, which have vowed to scrap ID cards if they win the next election, called it a "final act of ineffective and expensive authoritarianism".

Shadow home secretary, David Davis, said in a statement: "Labour's record on running huge databases has been one of the serial disasters of the last decade. It is almost certain that the massive database at the centre of this scheme will fail on cost, on time, and on management. It will almost certainly cost £20bn, will solve very few problems, and may make many much worse."

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, also hit out at Blair's comments and said the NIR will become a honey-pot for criminals and fraudsters.

Clegg said in a statement: "Blair must be living in cloud-cuckoo land if he seriously believes that the creation of the world's largest identity database will be a magic cure for identity fraud."