The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveils the first UK ID card for foreign nationals
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ID Cards
British national identity card
Enabling legislation for the British national identity card was passed under the Identity Cards Act 2006.
The cards will have a lesser role than the database they are linked to, which is known as the National Identity Register (NIR).
The Act specifies fifty categories of information that the NIR can hold on each citizen, including up to 10 fingerprints, digitised facial scan and iris scan, current and past UK and overseas places of residence of all residents of the UK throughout their lives and indices to other Government databases — which would allow them to be connected.
The legislation also says that any further information can be added.
The legislation further says that those renewing or applying for passports must be entered on to the NIR.
It is expected that this will happen soon after the UK Passport Service, which has now been renamed the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), start interviewing passport applicants to verify their identity.
The cards will have a lesser role than the database they are linked to, which is known as the National Identity Register (NIR).
The Act specifies fifty categories of information that the NIR can hold on each citizen, including up to 10 fingerprints, digitised facial scan and iris scan, current and past UK and overseas places of residence of all residents of the UK throughout their lives and indices to other Government databases — which would allow them to be connected.
The legislation also says that any further information can be added.
The legislation further says that those renewing or applying for passports must be entered on to the NIR.
It is expected that this will happen soon after the UK Passport Service, which has now been renamed the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), start interviewing passport applicants to verify their identity.
3 comments:
"The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveils the first UK ID card for foreign nationals."
The first?
Are you sure?
Here is David Blunkett in 2002: "Asylum seekers are now being issued with Application Registration Cards (ARCs) which also include biometric information in the form of fingerprints. Asylum seekers present a particular problem in verifying identity as they often enter the country without any official documents such as passports and those they have may not be genuine. The fingerprinting of asylum seekers to a legal standard of proof (unlike that suggested for the entitlement card scheme) helps to ensure that an individual cannot make more than one application for asylum and that the fingerprint evidence can be used in court."
So we've had ID cards for some foreigners for at least six years. In what sense, Home Secretary, truthfully, are you now introducing the "first UK ID card"?
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the identity card will replace the Application Registration Card.
Mr. Browne: There are no plans to replace the Application Registration Card (ARC) with the identity card. The ARC and its associated database provides a secure record of a person's claim for asylum and because of the use of biometric information this means that a person cannot make multiple applications using different identities. *The ARC does not prove identity*.
When the identity cards scheme is operational, a person whose asylum application was approved—and whose identity had therefore been validated—could then be issued with a new biometric residence permit card linked to a record on the National Identity Register. The use of biometric information would ensure that a person could not create one "identity" via the asylum system and another via the identity cards scheme.
Although there are no plans for the ARC to be a designated document within the terms of the Identity Cards legislation, this would not rule out the possibility that the ARC scheme and the Identity Cards programme might share some common infrastructure.
Thank you for your reply, Yes2ID.
It's something of a mixed bag, isn't it? If the ARC doesn't identify the individual concerned, what does it do and why issue it? What more will one of these new 25 November cards do?
The ARC continues to look like an ID card.
The 25 November cards are not the first ID cards. The Home Secretary's press release looks at first blush to be wrong.
And the question arises just what on earth IPS do all day if, after all this time, all they can manage is some minor re-packaging of a card we've had for years.
What do they do?
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PS Who are you, Yes2ID? You wish to promote ID for everyone but not yourself, apparently.
PPS Could you change the colour scheme on your blog – the black background makes it hard/impossible to see links.
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