Monday 9th October 2006
Key milestones for combating illegal immigration through the introduction of the National Identity Scheme were outlined by the Government today.
Speaking at an IPPR event, Home Office Minister Liam Byrne confirmed that ID cards will be implemented rapidly, starting with biometric cards for foreign nationals in 2008. These will prove eligibility to work and provide the vast majority of legitimate employers with a simple, secure means of checking entitlement to work.
Fingerprinting of visa applicants will be expanded to cover all visa-issuing posts by April 2008, protecting our borders from those seeking to enter the UK illegally and abuse free public services.An Identity Management Action Plan will also be produced by the end of the year and a series of detailed plans on how other government departments will benefit from using ID cards will be commissioned.
Home Office Minister Liam Byrne said:
"The way we prove our identity is changing. By requiring a standard secure way for people to prove their identity when accessing services, it will be much harder for people here illegally to carry out their daily business.
"Illegal working will become far more difficult as the National Identity Scheme is rolled out. Any employer would be able to check a person's unique reference number against registered information about their identity to find out whether someone is eligible to work in the UK.
"ID cards will give us a powerful tool to combat identity fraud which underpins organised crime, terrorism and abuse of the immigration system. ID cards will also help transform the delivery of public services to the citizen, making interactions swifter, more reliable and more secure and helping to reduce costs by eliminating wasteful duplication of effort."
The first report to Parliament about the likely costs of the ID cards scheme was also published today. It estimates that the total resource costs of providing passports and ID cards to UK nationals from October 2006 to October 2016 will be £5.4 billion. For the first time, this figure includes all the set-up and operational costs of the scheme.
Around 70% of these costs would be incurred in the issuing of new generation biometric passports - incorporating fingerprints as well as facial images - as the technical and office infrastructure would be largely the same. Approximately 15% of costs relate to technology with the vast majority of estimated costs relating to the people and premises necessary to interview passport and ID card applicants, detecting and deterring fraudulent applications.
Over the past four months the review commissioned by the Home Secretary has re-examined how the delivery and cost risks of the scheme could be reduced. This has included looking at whether there are assets and resources already available across other parts of Government that can be utilised by the National Identity Scheme.
This month, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) successfully completed the introduction of Britain's first biometric passport, with over 2 million ePassports issued since production began in March 2006. This landmark confirms IPS as one of the frontrunners in the international race to combat fraud and forgery.
NOTES TO EDITORS
1. The Identity Cards Act received Royal Assent on 30 March 2006. It establishes in statute the framework for a National Identity Scheme. The scheme will eventually cover everyone aged 16 or over who is legally resident in the United Kingdom for a specified period, likely to be three months or more.
2. Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Government to lay before Parliament at least every six months an estimate of the public expenditure likely to be incurred on the scheme over the following ten years. This cost report is the first to be laid under that requirement. It explains the benefits, the approach to implementation and provides cost estimates based on the latest business case.
3. The costs estimate includes:
4. In May 2005 the Home Office published the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) for the Identity Cards Bill which detailed high level cost estimates for the total average running costs for issuing passports and ID cards to UK nationals over 10 years. This cost was estimated at £584m, equating to £5.8bn over a 10 year period.
5. The RIA excluded some set-up costs which we set out today for the first time. RIA operational costs (on an annual basis) should therefore only be compared against the operational costs in the cost report (that are shown on a 10-year basis), ie, £5.8bn in the RIA versus £5.1bn in the cost report. The ten year period covered by the cost report is different from the 10-year period of the RIA (October 2006-October 2016 for the report, April 2009-March 2019). The period covered by the report is mandated by statute (section 37 of the Identity Cards Act).
