The previous ID card scheme introduced by the Labour government in 2008 was scrapped by the subsequent coalition government in 2010 after a limited roll-out. The cards were produced by 3M Security Printing & Systems, and the scheme is estimated to have cost some £300m.
But the migrant crisis involving tens of thousands of people arriving in Europe from North Africa, combined with recent scenes at Calais, have put ID cards back on the UK political agenda.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lord Green, the chairman of think tank MigrationWatch UK, said: “There hasn’t been a debate about ID cards for some time. We’re in a new situation here, and events in Calais are making people think again.
“Nobody knows who is legally here and who is not. If it was perfectly clear and someone could produce an ID card, then that disperses any suspicion. We have very large numbers of people coming to this country illegally and staying here and it has to be tackled. The public as a whole would like to see that done,” he stated.
De La Rue, the world’s biggest security printer, supplies ID cards and systems to a number of different countries and for a variety of applications including identity, foreign citizen ID cards and voting cards.
Product marketing director Julian Payne told PrintWeek that ID card methodology had moved on since Labour’s ill-fated project. “The key piece now is the back-end system. So you can get an ID card, scan it, and the system says ‘yes this is the right person’. The card needs to have obvious security features, and then there’s a database behind it,” he said.
“For people in continental Europe it’s been common to have to show your ID since Napoleonic times, but people are very sensitive about this in the UK because it feels intuitively intrusive,” Payne added. “The debate ahead is, if you want a national ID scheme, what do you want it for? Some countries have schemes specifically for foreigners.”
Former Labour immigration minister Phil Woolas has also called for the introduction of mandatory ID cards, while the mayor of Calais has cited the UK’s lack of ID cards as a pull factor for migrants camped in her city and making desperate attempts to reach the UK.
However, the Home Office’s current position is that there are no plans to revisit ID cards.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics put the official UK population at 64.6m last year. Six years ago, the number of illegal immigrants in the country was estimated to be as many as 863,000 in a report by the London School of Economics.
