PEOPLE in Greater Manchester will be the first in the country to get identity cards.
The region has been chosen to launch the voluntary scheme. Residents will be able to apply for a £30 card from the autumn. The controversial cards are then expected to be introduced nationwide and will be mandatory for foreign nationals.
ID cards latest
James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, said: "We wanted a sizeable metropolitan area with a good diversity of population and a large number of young people. Manchester fitted the bill, particularly with its universities and colleges.
"We believe young people will be among the first to take up the idea of having ID cards. Moving to adulthood is a time when you consistently have to assert and confirm your identity for all kinds of reasons, including taking out a loan, or renting a flat.
"They don’t have the same ID footprint that older people have and the new ID card, which is simple and convenient, will hopefully prove ideal.
Convenient
“Many people currently use their passport for such purposes but it is not a terribly convenient method, and 300,000 of them are either lost or stolen every year.”
The credit card-size ID cards will carry the same details as a passport, including a photograph, but will also have the holder’s fingerprints securely encrypted onto an electronic chip.
But critics say the scheme – for which the government has already awarded contracts worth £650m – is nothing more than an expensive risk to privacy.
Labour backbenchers blasted the Home Office for was spending so much when Britain faced cuts to other key services.
Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: “Manchester is being used as a guinea pig. All in all, this looks like a complete mess.
“It makes no sense that if you live in the area you will pay for an ID card, but not if you are just visiting. ”
'Complete mess'
The government claims the scheme will also offer increased protection against identity fraud and help protect communities against criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorists trying to exploit multiple identities.
The government has backtracked on plans to make the cards compulsory in the face of stiff opposition.
But one Labour backbencher told the MEN: “There is now a consensus in the Commons in favour of scrapping this altogether. It is a cost issue.”
Dave Page, co-ordinator of Manchester No2ID, said the cards were a discredited, unpopular farce.
Boycott
He said: “People are aware that the national identity scheme is nothing but an expensive risk to their privacy. The government claims that the cards add convenience but this just means that it will become impossible to live your life as normal without one.”
The news of the voluntary scheme comes as airline pilots said they would boycott a compulsory ID card scheme for workers at Manchester and London City airports which will also be launched in autumn.
Manchester Airport has already been announced as one of the trial sites for the compulsory card scheme for all ‘airside’ staff.
Jim McAuslan, general secretary of pilots’ union Balpa, said his members would resist with all legal means possible.
He said: “This is coercion and a case of Big Brother knows best. Our members are overwhelmingly against the government’s national ID card scheme trials for pilots and other airside workers.”
Comments
Login or Register to comment
They almost make it sound as though we should be grateful.
They cannot be trusted with our personal details.
This government is determined to push this through, so they'll be sneaky (as usual). First a voluntary scheme, then they'll persuade doctors, banks or benefit offices to refuse services unless you have one. Then you won't be able to tax your car without one. In a nutshell, they'll make it impossible to live your life without this 'voluntary' card. I will not be signing up for one, voluntary or compulsory!
I can see a huge take up in this, a scheme that will probabaly be scrapped and expecting the guinea pigs of Manchester to shell out £30 for this non-starter.
So congestion charge, now ID cards. What is next in line for the residents of Manchester to reject?
£30 quid to buy something that is for the government!! it should be sold/issued to people entering the U.K
I'm certainly NOT gonna sign up for/pay for or have one or carry one full stop, the Govt will have to jail me for my defiance;who do they think they are in forcing this unfairly on people and having control on their lives?
The cost of the card is £60? 30 for the card and 30 for collecting the data.
£30??? Should be free.
Jacqui, we citizens of Manchester do not want your useless, unnecessary and expensive ID cards inflicted upon us.
Use the residents of Redditch or South London, wherever it is that you live, as guinea pigs instead.
Whatever can be printed can be forged, as demonstrated by a recent Manchester court case.
"<I>securely encrypted onto an electronic chip</I>" We were told that with pip and chin - that has already been compromised. How many people remember the IT man who used to reprogramme students' meter cards for the price of a pint?
According to reports the government intends to use ordinary shops to harvest people's intimate details for this scheme. How many credit cards have been cloned by unscrupulous employees in shops, petrol stations and restaurants harvesting personal details?
Scrap the daft scheme now and save at least £5bn towards paying the UK's debts.
Haven't the government learned yet, Manchester as the birth place of the TUC and suffragette movements, amongst other things, will not be dictated to by a load of soft southerners and told to have ID cards at a cost of £60 plus the amount we also pay in as taxpayer subsidies. I'm less than 18 months off 50 and don't have a criminal record so what has my life got to do with civil servants, politicians and anybody they choose to sell our data to? It's usually sun and Mail readers who want these sort of infringements into our civil liberties because they don't know any better, but my life has naff all to do with anybody else unless I choose to share it with them on a voluntary basis.
If you are in the armed services or work for a government department, you are, quite rightly, vetted for that job. But you choose that by knowing what is expected. The government claims ID cards are voluntary but that won't last long. If you give people the power they are going to use it. Just look at the new Terrorism Laws and how many people have been stopped and searched under terrorism laws who are clearly not terrorists.
What was it Patrick Magoohan said in the Prisoner TV Series, "I am not a number, I am a free man". Not for much longer you aren't.
Come on all you students - some of you will have worked out how much of a bad move these things are. Get the NUS onto it, and get protesting outside your campus. I'll have one over my dead body.
People of Manchester, here is another opportunity to show those in Whitehall the error of their ways. Let us all boycott this big brother tactic to invade your individual privacy similar to the road tax referendum result.This is only a method to charge card you for minor infringements to local bylaws or litter dropping caught on CCTV and most sinister and cynical charging British citizens for the world wide web maybe even censoring free speech (we know who you are and we know where you live).
they are not happy unless they're taking more money off us!
this scheme has been unpopular from the start.
the price has been steadily rising year after year.
and all the time no one has said a good thing about it.
sounds very similar to something else that was nearly forced upon the people of manchester?
The card for Mancunians will be half price, don't be fooled by that one.
Why Manchester? Are we far away enough and small enough to manage? Imagine if Smith chose London. I do not need to put the imagery in your heads. This should be as unpopular with the public as the Poll Tax was to the Tories. Please do not sign up for this while you are "out shopping."
It is disgraceful that our high streets are to be the messengers of the new totalitarianism, and the nice, friendly face of Boots too boot. Remember George Orwell's vision of the future: "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face...forever." If shops can already refuse to serve people without ID regardless of age, where will it end? 1984. A date that is common currency, but has been postponed while the public is being acclimatised to loss of liberty and innocence, and a constant beady eye on all aspects of our lives. The card will actually cost £60. Including £30 for collecting data...another "administrative charge." Smith thinks if you repeat a lie it will become the truth...so did someone else.
I'm buying three under the names .... Hear no evil,speak no evil ,see no evil ...... just to make sure.
Well I don't want one for a start, who's laptop is the data going to be stored on. There are university,s in Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds,ect,Is this because we rejected the CON-charge, pay back time for them, we have photo driving license's pastport's what next have your photo on our frontdoors saying beware I live here. All I see this as is another tax, This goverment needs to change its name again from Nu-labour to the We Tax You party.
Don't forget we can see the take up numbers with the freedom of information act, let it be low.
I already have a credit card sized driving licence with all the information anyone needs on it. Even people who can't drive will have / can have a provisional licence. There's no need for me to have fingerprint recognition on a card. So I certainly won't be shelling out the rip off tax of £60 to get one.
Have I missed something? I pay £30 for a card that doesn't benefit me at all? Another silly idea - like the one where they wanted you to pay to drive to work. A tired government with tired ideas.
NO2ID, google it.
These ID cards are not to prove who you are.They are to track your every movement.Once carried in your pocket,these cards can follow your every step through the embedded chip on the card.This type of card is already being used by many governemnt depts already to track staff.
This should be for immigrants and people who have lived in the UK for less than 10 years!
I thought it was going to be £60? In any case, anybody (many in Whitehall believe we are all thick plebs up north) who pays for such a worthless piece of junk must have money to burn. The card will not be recognised as a method of ID as it is voluntary and open to abuse. It will also be scrapped next year unless you believe that Gordon Brown and his band of scoundrels will be returned to power - and of course if you believe in fairies.
Fingerprints will be stored at 'secure' government offices, managed by civil servants, possibly the same ones who keep losing essential data and leaving briefcases or laptops on trains. A new vast army of civil servants (based in London?) will be paid for out of the £60/£30 or whatever, and this money will also go into Treasury general coffers which can be used to pay for politician's expenses etc.
Not one criminal nor prospective criminal or terrorist etc will sign up to these cards for obvious reasons, which makes the whole ludicrous exercise worthless. I think we should all give a rousing Manchester two-fingered salute to the Whitehall mandarins in the same way as we did with the congestion charge.
Our current government appears to be made up of a large number of MPs that firmly believe that you can fool most of the people ALL of the time. Their insistence on bulldozing away any civil liberties that we innocent, law abiding citizens still have left is bizarre given their apparent unpopularity in the polls. Being a full 20 percent points behind the conservatives doesn't appear to have discouraged them from attempting to implement this completely unnecessary invasion of our privacy. Why on earth is this card necessary? I know it probably isn't going to prevent our government invading oil rich countries in the future on spurious grounds so it isn't going to reduce the so called "security risk".
Yesterday I stood in a bus station and was repeatedly warned to report anything suspicious. There was a suspicious lack of buses so today I'm going to phone the "terrorist hotline" and report that. I'm also going to report that pornography man's wife (home secretary Jacqui Smith) for large scale deception. It's really strange how the labour government are losing all of it's voters yet never bothering to sit down and work out why!
I suppose the police are an easy target for the pilot scheme as they can't really answer back or go on strike. They could hide their collar badges in protest ....oh yes, they already do that don't they!!!!
johnnyboy, Ashton-u-Lyne, Lancashire
Dont worry at £30/60 there wont be many .