[Infowarrior] - UK to fingerprint all children for national database

[Richard Forno]

Children of 11 to be finger printed
David Leppard
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1466943.ece

CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a
secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.

The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in
2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.

The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their
prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from
2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the
Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of
hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.

The plans are outlined in a series of ³restricted² documents circulating
among officials in the Identity and Passport Service. They form part of the
programme for the introduction of new biometric passports and ID cards.

Opposition politicians and privacy campaigners warn that the plans show
ministers are turning Britain into a ³surveillance society².

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: ³This borders on the sinister
and it shows the government is trying to end the presumption of innocence.
With the fingerprinting of all our children, this government is clearly
determined to enforce major changes in the relationship between the citizen
and the state in a way never seen before.²

Under the new passport and ID scheme, everyone over 16 who applies for a
passport will have their details ‹ including fingerprints and eye or facial
scans ‹ added to the National Identity Register from next year.

>From October 2009, ID cards will be issued alongside new passports.
Initially these will not be mandatory, but Tony Blair has said that if
Labour is reelected it will make them compulsory, a process that the
documents predict will take just over a decade.

Children under 16 will not be part of the ID card scheme. But the documents
show that from 2010 they will still have to be fingerprinted for a new
passport.

The prints will initially be stored on the directorate¹s database. Once
children reach 16 their fingerprints and other personal information will be
passed for storage on the register, along with those of nearly 50m adults.

Children applying for passports will have to travel up to 80 miles to
special Home Office screening centres to have their fingerprints taken.

The leaked plans envisage 90 new enrolment centres for the ID card scheme on
top of the existing network of passport offices. They estimate that it will
cost £528m over 10 years in travel costs for the 5.75m people expected to
apply for a new passport each year.

The documents also spell out how the cost of passports is set to rise again
this year. They say that unless the Home Office can get extra funding for
the scheme, the cost of an adult passport will rise by £10 to £76 this
October.

The cost will have risen by 81% since December 2005 when it increased from
£42 to £51. Last October the price rose again to £66. When Labour came to
power in 1997 a passport cost £18.

The plans show that the price of a child¹s passport is to rise even more
sharply, to £58 from the present £45. The price will have more than doubled
in less than two years, rising in stages from £25 to £34 in December 2005
and to £45 last October.

Critics described the plans as a stealth tax on holidaymakers to pay for the
controversial ID cards scheme. Ministers have already conceded that the cost
of the new combined ID card and passport will be £93 from 2009, but the
documents show that price could rise to £109 at to-day¹s prices.

A range of further ³stealth charges² will also be imposed, according to the
documents. Women who change their names if they get married will have to pay
£36; a further £27 will be charged to replace a lost or stolen ID card; £26
to replace a damaged card; and £6 for a change of address or personal ID
number.

The documents show that ID cards will not be made compulsory for more than a
decade, under present plans. ³Compulsion will be triggered once 80% take-up
is achieved in [the first quarter of] 2019,² they state. ³It is assumed
that, following compulsion, a 100% registration will be achieved two years
later.²

The prime minister has hailed the ID cards scheme as the centrepiece of
efforts to combat terrorism and illegal immigration, as well as identity
theft and benefit fraud. But opponents dismiss it as a ³Big Brother² scheme
that is too expensive, poorly planned and unlikely to function efficiently.

Last year leaked e-mails from civil servants warned the scheme could be a
³botched operation² that could delay the introduction of ID cards for a
generation. The government says the scheme will cost £6 billion to
implement. However, in 2005, the London School of Economics estimated it
would cost £19 billion.

The Tories have pledged to scrap the scheme if they win the next election.