The government says the ID card database will become a national population register of basic personal information for the public sector to verify identity and has called for the development of a children's register as well.
The Treasury confirmed this week that the newly created Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will take over the work being done by the Office for National Statistics on the Citizen Information Project to create an adult population register containing a person's name, address, date of birth and a unique ID reference number.
Des Browne, chief secretary to the Treasury, said in a statement to parliament: "The IPS should be responsible for developing the national identity register (NIR) as an adult population database. Over time public sector systems, business processes and culture should be adapted to use the NIR as the definitive source of contact details in the longer term."
The NIR will only contain details of adults over the age of 16 but a national child population database could also be on the cards.
Browne said: "The Department for Education and Skills should also consider whether there is scope to realise further efficiency and effectiveness benefits through a child population register."
Until the NIR is up and running the Treasury said it should be a priority for HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to look at short-term arrangements for wider use of the National Insurance number and ways to better share personal information.
Browne said: "There is significant value to both citizens and the public sector in greater sharing of contact details — name, address, date of birth, reference numbers — in a secure way across the public sector."
Talkback
Some years ago we cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall ............
And we despised the communists spying on their population......
Fairly trivial expansion to log your vote, books you read, films you watch. Where can we go to seek political asylum?
Privacy issues apart, I hope this doesn't turn into another one of those bottomless pits for public money. This is, after all, little more than a user directory (albeit a large one) and there are a number of well established, commercially available directories out there. Novell's e-directory springs to mind as already used, I believe, by 35 million French taxpayers.
As a genealogist I know that a person can quite legally have a number of names. But successive governments assume that to have more than one name is a good pointer to you being a criminal. In the past you could have a bank accounts in as many names as you wanted. Now you have to prove who you are. Perhaps the government would prefer us all to simply be numbers.
Remeber Patrick McGoohan back in 1968 - "I am not a number I am a person."
If the electorate think this is a such good thing, as the President often asserts, why is it I very seldom read positive statements about the NIR from anywhere outside of the Labour party?
Personally I think it is typical NuLabour control freakery writ large and I simply want no part of it.
http://www.renewforfreedom.org/