The first UK ID cards will be of limited use for full biometric ID checks on foreign workers, with the government yet to reveal a timetable for the deployment of scanners capable of reading the cards.
The first UK ID cards were issued to people from outside the European Economic Area on Tuesday.
But the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has revealed that, for the foreseeable future, employers will not have scanners that can verify a worker's ID against the fingerprint and facial scans held on the card's chip.
Employers instead will have to rely on visual checks on the card and calls to a UK Border Agency (UKBA) hotline if they have any concerns that the card might not be genuine.
The admission by the IPS bolsters recent concerns that the ID verification scheme has been relegated to relying on 'flash and go' cards, after Home Office documents revealed this month that the cards' biometric details will only be cross-referenced with the central National Identity Register in a minority of cases.
An IPS spokesman said: "There are currently no scanners that will be available to employers."
"Over time, there will be a number of ways of authenticating and verifying identity, depending on the importance of the check, ranging from a visual check to a biometric check," the spokesman said. "These are the first cards to be rolled out and the scheme will be developed over the next couple of years."
Phil Booth, national co-ordinator for ID-cards pressure group NO2ID, said: "It makes a lie of all these grandiose claims about biometrics if there is not the infrastructure to back it up."
"It will be a bit of plastic that will be eminently copyable," Booth said.
According to Booth, employers have been told to flick the card and listen for a distinctive sound, if they doubt the card's authenticity.
"This is the mechanism by which employers are supposed to be checking a worker's identity. It is farcical," he said.
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The cards will contain a person's name; place and date of issue of the card; the type of permit; how long it is valid and whether or not the holder can work; and a chip containing their fingerprint and facial scans. Biometric details will be collected from all foreign nationals over the age of six.
Cards are being introduced for foreign students, at a cost of between £295 and £500, and for people seeking marriage visas at a cost of between £395 and £595. Other categories of foreign nationals will be required to take up the cards at a later date.
Fingerprints and facial scans will be captured at seven UKBA centres, starting with Croydon on Tuesday, ahead of other centres in Armagh, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and Sheffield, with all centres taking biometrics by the middle of December.
The Home Office said it will issue 50,000 cards to foreign nationals between now and April 2009, and that it expects to be issuing more than one million such ID cards per year within three years.
Talkback
...the government will spy on the people for their own money!
"Cards are being introduced for foreign students, at a cost of between £295 and £500, and for people seeking marriage visas at a cost of between £395 and £595"
The presumption of guilt is going forth.
: The presumption of guilt is going forth.
Hey, they've suspended the right to a trial by jury of our peers, something rivers of blood were spilt to obtain. In tax law and many other arenas you are indeed guilty until you expensively prove yourself innocent.
You see, it's in order to make this whole messy law business more convenient for the government and their agencies. We can't have innocent people gumming up the works by trying to claim what they believe to be their rights .. you know fair trial, free speech, free assembly and all that outdated stuff.
People just need to understand that president Brown and his boot boys and girls are automatically right and immune to the rules they create. They won't be on the children's Contact Point database. They will have special cloaked status on the NIR. The rest of us plebs just have to tug our unworthy forelocks and kowtow to the Iron Masters.
Tell me. Is this the country you were born to? It certainly wasn't what I was lead to expect.
I thought they maintained the immigration figures were much smaller than 1 million a year, but I suppose it helps the budget to show an income of between £300m and £600m per year entirely due to ID cards. Probably rounded up to the £600m figure. They may even pay for themselves!
With Christmas coming, I expect our government are probably writing many letters to Santa in the belief that he will sort this mess out for them, and if he doesn't there are always the fairies at the bottom of the garden in Downing St, or some oil lamps to rub.