Gordon Brown’s first six months in power present an opportunity to review many policy commitments, and one that is sure to be on his list is the national identity card scheme. It remains, in principle, popular with the public, but support is ebbing away as some of the civil libertarian attacks start to hit home and the costs rise. A useful checkpoint is coming up. Last year, as chancellor, Brown commissioned a public-private forum on identity management under the former head of HBOS, James Crosby, to look at the potential uses of the proposed scheme by business. The forum is due to report towards the end of the year, and this provides a convenient opportunity for reviewing the project. I say this not because I want Brown to scrap it—I’m sure he will not—but because I want him to take the time to make it better. That is, to make it simpler, cheaper and more useful.
Why? Well, not having an identity scheme is clearly sub-optimal, but I don’t think the proposed scheme is optimal either. I would prefer to see a third way: a scheme that takes into account both the march of technology and the practicalities of deployment; that meets the government’s goals but sets aside its presumed solution. We lack a technologically informed, socially aware vision for national identity management, and we need to construct one.
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