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07 November 2006
Prime Minister Tony Blair has insisted that the government's new ID card scheme will be effective in the battle against fraud and identity theft.
Mr Blair was writing in the Daily Telegraph, where he said that the application of biometrics can "offer us a massive opportunity to secure our identities."
Apart from being used to curb illegal immigration and employment, benefit fraud and terrorism, he said, the cards would make a significant impact on identity fraud, which, according to the government's own figures, cost the UK £1.7 billion last year.
"Building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder," he said.
Government plans have faced opposition both inside and outside parliament, with civil liberties groups and opposition parties arguing that the cards may be used to restrict some personal freedoms.
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, writing yesterday in MK News, said: "They (the public) don’t understand that the state will know where they are and what they are doing all the time."
However, according to the prime minister, the anti-cards case has been exaggerated, including the arguments about cost and reliability.
Mr Blair said the public was "overwhelmingly" behind security methods like CCTV and "that's what surveys suggest, too, about their [the public's] position on ID cards."
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