British government makes $9 billion error: this is news?
By Gareth Powell
Thousands of ID cards have been issued to foreign residents in the UK as part of the government’s $9 billion ID scheme. There are no machines to read them so they are effectively useless.
The cards started to be issued last year. But the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has admitted that not one police station, border and immigration point or job center has a machine that can read the cards’ biometric chips. And there is still no firm timetable for the introduction of card readers.
The woods are alive with the noise of rear ends being covered. A government minister has said that it would be up to police forces to decide when to invest in the technology. Damn good, and damn right.
The fact that Britain is sub-divided into many police organizations who cannot even agree on the shape of their helmets has nothing to do with it. It is up to them to make the first move. When they had got them readers would be given to immigration officials over time.
Or, putting it in that special form of gobbledygook no-one can understand, a Home Office spokesperson said, “The timetable for the roll out of scanners of biometric chips will be in incremental stages. Scanners capable of reading electronic chips for foreign nationals will be come more readily available as we ramp up the issuing of cards.”
Yes, but there are none as yet. None. Not one.
The first cards were issued last November. 50,000 cards are expected to be issued to foreign nationals by April. The Home Office estimates that three million foreign nationals will carry a card by 2010.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said, “Once again ministers have shown that the ID card project is absolutely farcical. What is the point of spending billions of pounds on cards that can’t be read?”
Well, there is that, but there is no point in being rude about it.
A spokesperson for the UK Border Authority said, “ID cards will help protect against identity fraud, illegal working and immigration, crime and terrorism, and those trying to abuse positions of trust and will make it easier for people to prove they are who they say they are.” If we but had the machines to read the damn things.
The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has published official estimates that 12.5 million UK citizens will have an ID card by 2014/15. But what about the card readers, Jacqui? She said the IPS is currently developing the product choice offered to customers, and figures for the projected product volumes will be published in due course.
Meanwhile adding farce to farce, a Welsh MP has called for the ID card to include Welsh text, to demonstrate the language’s equality with English.
Nia Griffith, a Labour MP, said it is important to have Welsh on ID cards: it sends a “clear message” of its equality with English and it builds up the confidence of Welsh speakers.
Such utter nonsense. The writer was brought up in the Welsh speaking area of Sir Dinbych. Totally Welsh speaking. My brother’s wife was brought in the south of Wales, in Llanelli. She worked for the government in the Welsh language department.
She and my mother found it easier to speak in English. For there are two kinds of Welsh, arguably three, and there are major differences. About 20 percent of the three million inhabitants speak Welsh and almost none as a first language.
Now we must wait for every card to be translated into Welsh and THEN get a bilingual reading machine.
Not in your life-time matey. Probably not in mine.
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Stumble It!
February 9th, 2009
It’s purely a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.
If there had been card readers issued first the complaint would have been that everyone had expensive readers but there were no cards in circulation.
I reckon too many people want this both ways.
They want control on immigration and for the Gov to know precisely what the situation on that is (a bit of an impossibility if you ask me) but they resent the necessary means to do it.
There are also a stack of people who seem to imagine ID cards are some sort of new repressive mechanism and who prefer to ignore that several EU countries have them already and yet they are still open and free democracies.
February 10th, 2009
There is much in what you say but this is more than a minor tremble. The idea of the cards has been around a long time and they were official last November. Readers of the cards are not that difficult to make. Yet the makers have been fobbed of by buck passing from the department to the assorted police forces and back again. It is a political hot potato. Yet I have carried one for many years and had no problems with it whatsoever. If a driving license, why not an ID card?