Soft colours and symbolic flowers may suggest little sister rather than big brother, but the pink and blue card complete with rose, thistle, daffodil and shamrock, to be issued to foreign workers from November, is unlikely to reassure opponents of the government's multi-billion-pound identity card scheme. Beginning with foreign nationals, including students and people claiming residence rights through marriage, is an approach designed to reinforce the argument that these first ID cards (which will include fingerprints, a photograph and personal details, including date and place of birth) will be an effective means of preventing illegal immigration and foreign nationals working illegally.
The argument that ID cards will safeguard national security must be made convincingly and the £4.7bn cost (although some estimates are as much as double that) justified by next year when workers at security-sensitive sites such as airports will be the first British nationals to have ID cards. Employers and trade unionists in the air travel industry have voiced objections, and the British Airline Pilots Association is considering a legal challenge if it is made compulsory. In an industry where employees are already required to have security passes, the objections are more likely to be on practical than ideological grounds and the government will lose all credibility if it does not take them seriously.
The country has yet to be convinced that ID cards will help prevent serious crime and terrorism by making it more difficult for criminals to obtain false identities. Instead, the alarming loss of computerised data over the past two years, including personal details of 25 million people who receive child benefit, three million driving-test candidates and thousands of military personnel, has reinforced concerns that databases are not sufficiently secure. The fear is that rather than preventing identity theft, such a store of personal information would provide rich pickings for criminals. Assurances that biometric information will be stored separately from personal details are of limited worth. The extra step in the system will be an obstacle for thieves but the requirement for cross-referencing increases the likelihood of human error resulting in information being wrongly matched. The security of the chips containing the biometric information has also been questioned, with claims that cloned chips have passed successfully through the scanning equipment which will be used.
At a time when economic calculations have been thrown into chaos, the considerable cost of this scheme cannot be dismissed. With the Conservatives warning they will not proceed with it if elected and the polls indicating they are likely to be in government in two years, there is a real danger that a half-implemented scheme could become an expensive white elephant. If ID cards offered a failsafe system of protection against illegal immigration, fraud and terrorism, UK citizens might regard them as fair exchange for an encroachment on their civil liberties, but the case remains to be proven.
