7 April 2009
Just after Parliament has gone on Easter recess, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has chosen to announce over half a billion pounds worth of contracts for its controversial National Identity Scheme.
CSC has been awarded £385 million to "upgrade IPS' application and enrolment system" – which will register applicants for both ID cards and passports – and IBM has been awarded £265 million to "build and run the [biometric] database", which is ultimately intended to hold the fingerprints and facial images of every UK resident over the age of 16.
The pretext is that most expenditure would have to be incurred by changes being made to passports anyway, though UK passports have only recently been changed to meet the standard agreed by the 148 countries in the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The costs claimed for these changes have already hiked the price of a passport from £42 in late 2005 to £72 now [1].
Combined with biographical data held in the DWP's 'Customer Information System' (CIS), the contracts mark the first steps towards the 'National Identity Register' – the set of linked databases at the heart of the ID system. A previous £18 million contract for a temporary ID database was awarded to Thales UK in August 2008, so that the Home Office could meet politically-imposed deadlines for roll-out and avoid embarrassing ministers. Now the contracts are openly being restructured to suit longer-term goals.
Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID [2] said:
'Despite knowing that the ID scheme will be scrapped under any change of government, the Home Office is ploughing ahead with its gold-plated white elephant.
'The new style contracts are calculated to obscure exactly what is going on, but the IPS appears to thinks it can lock future governments into its empire-building plans by throwing away the perfectly good passport systems we have.'
-ENDS-
Notes for editors:
1) As far back as 2003, "more than half" of the price rise for a standard adult passport from £33 to £42 was claimed to be for "the inclusion in passports of information identifying their owners - microchips containing fingerprints, for example, or pictures of their iris or other facial characteristics" – see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/
2) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.
For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please contact:
Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net
Guy Herbert (General Secretary, general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308
Michael Parker (Press Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166
The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ
enquiries@no2id.net
Tel: 07005 800 651
Press: click here
