Combating illegal immigration at centre of ID card

Speaking at an IPPR event, Home Office Minister Liam Byrne confirmed that ID cards will be implemented rapidly, starting with biometric cards for foreign nationals in 2008. These will prove eligibility to work and provide the vast majority of legitimate employers with a simple, secure means of checking entitlement to work.

Fingerprinting of visa applicants will be expanded to cover all visa-issuing posts by April 2008, protecting our borders from those seeking to enter the UK illegally and abuse free public services.

An Identity Management Action Plan will also be produced by the end of the year and a series of detailed plans on how other government departments will benefit from using ID cards will be commissioned.

Home Office Minister Liam Byrne said:

"The way we prove our identity is changing. By requiring a standard secure way for people to prove their identity when accessing services, it will be much harder for people here illegally to carry out their daily business.

"Illegal working will become far more difficult as the National Identity Scheme is rolled out. Any employer would be able to check a person's unique reference number against registered information about their identity to find out whether someone is eligible to work in the UK.

"ID cards will give us a powerful tool to combat identity fraud which underpins organised crime, terrorism and abuse of the immigration system. ID cards will also help transform the delivery of public services to the citizen, making interactions swifter, more reliable and more secure and helping to reduce costs by eliminating wasteful duplication of effort."

The first report to Parliament about the likely costs of the ID cards scheme was also published today. It estimates that the total resource costs of providing passports and ID cards to UK nationals from October 2006 to October 2016 will be £5.4 billion. For the first time, this figure includes all the set-up and operational costs of the scheme.

Around 70% of these costs would be incurred in the issuing of new generation biometric passports - incorporating fingerprints as well as facial images - as the technical and office infrastructure would be largely the same. Approximately 15% of costs relate to technology with the vast majority of estimated costs relating to the people and premises necessary to interview passport and ID card applicants, detecting and deterring fraudulent applications.

Over the past four months the review commissioned by the Home Secretary has re-examined how the delivery and cost risks of the scheme could be reduced. This has included looking at whether there are assets and resources already available across other parts of Government that can be utilised by the National Identity Scheme.

This month, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) successfully completed the introduction of Britain's first biometric passport, with over 2 million ePassports issued since production began in March 2006. This landmark confirms IPS as one of the frontrunners in the international race to combat fraud and forgery.