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ID details 'to help solve crimes'
A sample ID card
The government plans a national identity register
Number 10 has insisted it has always been the plan to allow fingerprints collected for ID cards to be cross checked against crime scene prints.

In an e-mail to 27,000 signatories of an online anti-ID card petition, Tony Blair said the prints would be checked against 900,000 unsolved crimes.

He wrote that he believed the register "will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice".

The Conservatives and the Lib Dems both oppose plans for identity cards.

Mr Blair was responding to the more than 27,000 people who signed the e-petition on the Downing Street website.

The petition stated: "We the undersigned petition the prime minister to scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards. The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding citizens of the UK."

Mr Blair outlined the benefits that the government and security services believe will come from having ID cards - and the register of biometric details - to combat crime and terrorism.

Unsolved crimes

He wrote: "I believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice.

"They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register."

The Home Office said the police would not be allowed to search the register, saying their Identity and Passport Agency would do any database searching.

The PM's official spokesman said that it was always the government's intention that the police could get access to fingerprint data contained on the planned register.

Under the Identity Card Bill, first published in April 2004, approved authorities would be allowed access to "limited parts" of people's details on the register, with the person's consent, so they could check somebody's identity.

The bill also said that details could also be given without consent to police, intelligence agencies, customs and tax authorities and certain government departments for preventing and detecting serious crime, ensuring national security, investigating benefits fraud and protecting Britain's "economic well-being".

'Fishing expedition'

Mr Blair's spokesman said: "If the police ask for fingerprints to be cross-checked, that has always been part of the intention of the bill."

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are opposed to the ID scheme, saying it will not prevent illegal immigration or identity fraud and will cost far more than government estimates.

The ID card scheme approved by Parliament means everyone wanting a new passport will need to provide details - such as fingerprints - from next year.

They do not have to get an identity card however, although the government says it intends to bring in a bill if it wins the next election to make identity cards compulsory.

The best system was accurate 98.6 percent of the time on single-finger tests, 99.6 percent of the time on two-finger tests, and 99.9 percent of the time for tests involving four or more fingers. These accuracies were obtained for a false positive rate of 0.01 percent.

And people who have commited crimes will willingly have their finger prints taken?

And people who have commited crimes will willingly have their finger prints taken?

Well, I suppose you might get the really dumb petty criminals, like the ones who broke into my car a few years back, stealing £1.20 from my dashboard (and costing me £85 to fill up the hole and fit remote central locking). This is the only time I've been a victim of crime where the police have actually bothered to get prints AND found any.

The chances are the thief was either drunk or high at the time and will have forgotton all about it when they come to try and get a passport in order to pay for a 2 week pissup in Ibiza.

I rest assured that I can sleep soundly in my bed knowing that such hardened, gun-toting criminal scumbags will finally be brought to justice and I will get my £86.20 back after all these years.. at £1 a week for the next 86 and a bit weeks no doubt.


Meanwhile the people we really need to catch will have other ways of getting around and about without such a card.