ID Cards: A Solution in Search of a Problem?

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Regarding the ongoing debate about whether the UK should have a national identity card, let's be clear what it would and would not do. ID cards would not help prevent illegal immigration. Asylum seekers are already issued with identity documents while their application is being processed, and creating a new form of ID wouldn't make any difference to them. Equally, people who enter the country illegally without being caught cannot obtain any of the documentation that regular citizens use, such as a driving license or passport, so they either manage without them or they buy fakes. Introducing ID cards would make it harder to survive without any form of documentation, but that would only force illegal immigrants to buy them on the black-market. It would just become an extra source of income for the criminal gangs who already make a fortune from smuggling people into the country. ID cards would not reduce crime. Muggers, shoplifters, burglars, rapists and murderers do not stop to show proof of identity before going about their business. Con artists and fraudsters will simply get a set of false cards, as they would already get false driving licenses, passports, etc. Indeed, the alleged convenience of having a single identity document that can be used for everything would benefit the criminal as much as the law-abiding citizen, since it would make it much easier to adopt or steal a complete new identity. It won't help the police to identify people because identifying people they've already apprehended is hardly a significant problem anyway. It certainly won't help them find out who committed a crime or help them get the evidence to prove it. ID cards would be unlikely to have a significant effect on benefit fraud. Most benefit fraud is about people giving false details rather than claiming to be other people, for example by claiming disability benefit because of an injury they've already recovered from, or claiming unemployment benefit while working. An ID card won't help to detect that, and there are already a variety of documents that a person might be asked to produce to help prove who they are. ID cards would not deter terrorists. Most terrorist groups don't rely on living under false identities to accomplish their objectives. They evade detection by using people who are not known to the police and security services, and by exploiting the freedoms of movement and association that are part of a free society. The fact that some of them might occasionally be asked to show an ID card in the street isn't going to make any difference. Any who'd entered the country illegally would just buy a fake ID, like all the other illegal immigrants. ID cards would be widely faked. No matter what the government may hope, any kind of "smart" card they issue will be susceptible to forgery. It may take the forgers a while to figure out, but it will happen. The reality is that any technology that is so sophisticated it can't be faked would be too secret and too expensive to use on a mass-market device. If you're issuing tens of millions of cards it has to be done with conventional commercial technology, which means technology that is also available to the criminal community. It would be compulsory to carry your ID card with you. An optional ID card is really a contradiction in terms, since there's little point in issuing people with official proof of identity and then leaving it up to them whether they use it. The fact that the government has suggested any possible scheme might not be compulsory is really just a clumsy attempt to disarm its critics. It's possible that they might introduce a scheme that was not compulsory at first, but it would only be a matter of time before it was made so. ID cards would cost a fortune. It's not just a matter of developing and issuing sophisticated "smart" cards to the entire adult population. There'd be massive new computer systems and lots of civil servants to administer the scheme, and all the agencies that were supposed to make use of them - such as the police and Department of Social Security - would need to have all their systems upgraded to enable them to do so. Indeed, every government department would have to change its procedures and computer systems to allow it to accept national ID cards as proof of identity. Given the government's poor record on large IT projects, this would require a huge amount of time and money to implement fully. ID cards would damage relations between the police and public, as most people would strongly resent being stopped and asked to prove who they were. Public confidence in the police is already falling, so it would only require a small number of officers to abuse that power, or simply use it in an over-zealous manner, to seriously affect public attitudes. Finally, the fact that ID cards are widely used in other European countries does not mean that we should have them as well. After all, if they're so effective why do those countries still have crime, benefit fraud and illegal immigration? The reasons why some countries have ID cards and some don't lie in the differences in their political and legal cultures. We should be proud of the fact that we don't have identity cards because it is evidence of the way in which the British common law tradition has historically protected the interests of the citizen against the demands of the state. Of course, ID cards would not turn Britain into a police state. Most of us already possess a variety of cards and documents to identify us for various purposes, and many of us carry a mobile phone that could potentially be used to track our movements. The average citizen already leaves a data trail a mile wide, so adding one more card won't make it 1984. But the government's interest in ID cards is evidence of an unacceptably authoritarian attitude, and an unhealthy distrust of the people. So overall ID cards are a solution looking for a problem. Their likely impact would be to make things slightly worse, but at enormous expense.

		Last Updated: 1 Oct 07