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UK spends $6.6 billion on biometric IDs, forgets to buy card reader

10 February 2009 12:58 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva â€“ APA-Economics. The British Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has spent Â£4.7bn ($6.6bn) on its new biometric ID card system. But it has not established a timeline for a card-reader rollout.
Without the necessary card readers, the biometric information such as fingerprint scans stored in the cards is inaccessible and therefore useless for ID verification.
The problem is that there is not one card reader in the entire country, not at any police station, customs locations, anywhere in the entire country.
A government minister has said that it would be up to police forces to decide when to invest in the technology, and that readers would be given to immigration officials over time.
Last November, the first cards were issued to some foreign students and people applying to renew visas issued on the basis of marriage. They were the first compulsory identity cards in Britain since the 1950s.
The red and blue card bears the royal crest plus the shamrock, daffodil, thistle and rose to symbolise the four parts of the United Kingdom.
The card shows various personal details, including the bearer’s picture, name, date of birth, status in the UK and eligibility for work. On the reverse of the card is the bearerâ€™s town and country of birth, gender and whether they have the right to UK state benefits. The biometric details are the bearerâ€™s two fingerprints. But these fingerprint scans can only be accessed by reading the biometric chip embedded in the cards.
The lack of proper technology to read the data stored in cards means that officials will be forced to continue to use traditional methods to confirm a cardholderâ€™s identity - taking a fresh set of prints and checking them against existing databases.