Wed Nov 21 2007

By Michael Holden (Source. www.reuters.co.uk)

LONDON (Reuters) - Critics of plans for compulsory identity cards said on Wednesday the multi-billion pound scheme should be ditched after the government admitted it had mislaid personal details of half the population.

Opposition politicians and opponents said the revelation that the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) tax authority had lost data on 25 million people showed the government could not be trusted to bring in ID cards, which would involve one of the world's biggest IT schemes.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government intends to start rolling out the biometric cards, which will carry fingerprint, iris and face-recognition technology, from 2009.

Ministers say the cards are vital to fight terrorism, serious organised crime and illegal immigration.

The scheme, which will also be the world's most ambitious biometric project and is expected to cost 5 billion pounds over the next decade, has long attracted criticism.

Campaigners have argued the cards would infringe civil rights and the opposition Conservative Party, which has vowed to scrap the scheme if it wins the next election, says it will be a costly flop.

They leapt on Tuesday's revelation on Tuesday that the government had lost the data -- potentially the largest security lapse in British history leaving millions at risk of ID and bank fraud -- as a clear reason for dropping the plans.

"Today must mark the final blow for ambitions of this government to create a national ID card scheme -- they simply cannot be trusted with people's information," said George Osborne, the Conservative Treasury spokesman.

Phil Booth, the national coordinator of the NO2ID campaign group, said the government should not only immediately halt development of the cards but carry out an audit of the information it already held about the public.

"This data disaster shows up the madness behind the government's ID schemes," he said.

"It's bad enough that HMRC can't be trusted with basic financial details. But within five years the Home Office could be leaking or losing people's complete identity records."

Chancellor Alistair Darling, who admitted the data loss was "inexcusable", said that the government would press ahead with ID cards as their biometric element would provide people with an extra tier of protection.

"The advantage of identity cards is using biometric details you can be surer of the identity of the person who is requesting the information," he told BBC radio.

"This is a recognition of the fact that in today's world and in the future an awful lot of information is now held by organisations. We've got to make sure it's correctly linked to the individual who is entitled to it."

The proposed scheme would see Britons issued with ID cards for the first time since their abolition after World War Two.

ID cards are used in about a dozen European Union countries but are not always compulsory and do not carry as much data as those planned for Britain.