Government Must End ID Cards Plan Now say Milton Keynes Liberal Democrats

6.30.00pm GMT Mon 3rd Dec 2007

The Government's data disaster over Child Benefit records shows why plans for Identity Cards must be scrapped, say Milton Keynes Liberal Democrats.

Following the revelation that the personal details of 25 million parents and children have been lost by the Government's Revenue and Customs department (HMRC), and may have fallen into the hands of identity fraudsters, Milton Keynes Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Spokesperson Jill Hope has written to the Prime Minister urging him to abandon his plans for a national ID cards scheme and a National Identity Register.

"The fiasco at HMRC has shown the dangers of the Government holding huge amounts of information about each one of us, whilst being slipshod in the way that information is looked after," said Jill Hope.

"This whole saga of incompetence has been shocking, and families in Milton Keynes are now rightly asking whether their personal details are safe. I am one of the very people whose data has been mislaid and I am angry about it. As a former corporate banker I know how sensitive information ought to be handled, and it is astonishing that someone junior in HMRC is able to make a mistake like this. Is it poor training or poor management? The data may turn up safe, but the system failure will still be there," Jill continued.

The National Identity Register, which the Government plan to set up as part of the Identity Card scheme, will hold vastly more information on each and every one of us than Customs and Revenue managed to lose.

The possibilities for the loss of that information, either accidentally or through illegitimate means, must make the Government stop and think again very seriously about their plan to store all the data they can about all of us in a central register.

Jill Hope added: "This is a clear illustration of the real dangers of a Big Brother centralised state. State control of personal identity details is a real threat to our civil liberties. The Government should respond to the anger and now abandon its ID card scheme. It is clear that the Government cannot be trusted to effectively manage mass databases of personal information.

"That is why I have written to Gordon Brown urging him to think again. The Government must end the Identity Card scheme for good, in order to ensure that we do not risk a personal data disaster on an even more catastrophic scale."

The Liberal Democrats opposed Identity Cards at every stage while the scheme went through Parliament. We said the scheme would be expensive, misguided and insecure. If the Conservatives had joined us in opposing the cards from the start, instead of flip-flopping on the issue, it would already have been dropped.