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London: Ministers were on Thursday battling to keep the ID card scheme on track after they admitted that Britons will not automatically be given a card when obtaining a new passport.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith insisted that the Government remained fully committed to the £5.4-billion (Dh40 billion) plan, under which everyone's fingerprints and facial biometrics will be stored on a national database.
She said that ID cards would become compulsory for students from outside Europe from November and mandatory for around 200,000 airport workers from next year.
But, in a significant concession, she said that previous plans to require all Britons obtaining a new passport to also take a card were being shelved and that they would only be voluntary. Although Smith insisted that the Government remained committed to compulsory ID cards, officials indicated that they have effectively been pushed back several years and could even be shelved.
Concession
The concession is intended to placate critics who argue that the cards are unnecessary and expensive, although the retreat on mandatory cards will not satisfy those who argue that the massive new biometric database, which will still come into effect, is the main problem. They say its information will be vulnerable to mishandling by officials and abuse by criminals.
The new details of the ID card scheme were announced yesterday by Smith in a speech to the Left-leaning think tank Demos in which she repeated the Government's insistence that the scheme will be vital to fight crime, tackle terrorism and combat illegal immigration.
"Given that the Al Qaida handbook suggests that terrorists should use multiple identities, given that it is a way that organised criminals and terrorists use to cover their tracks, a national identity scheme which links a person's identity to their biometrics will make us safer and more secure," she said.
Smith said that the first cards would be issued from November when they would start to become compulsory for students from outside the European Economic Area, which covers more than 300,000 people each year. She said the cards would also be required from early next year by the 45,000 or so foreigners who seek to enter Britain each year to marry or as an existing spouse.
The first cards to be issued to Britons will also come next year when around 200,000 airport staff will have to join the scheme. From 2010 all British students will be offered ID cards, while in 2011 passport applicants will be required to log their biometric details.
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