Government must end crazy ID cards plan now,

9.39.47pm UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 21st Nov 2007

The Government's data disaster over child benefit records shows why plans for Identity Cards must be scrapped, say Bognor Regis and Littlehampton 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, Arun's Liberal Democrat leader, Councillor Simon McDougall has called for the Prime Minister to abandon his plans for a national ID cards scheme and a National Identity Register in which the Government want to store the personal information of everyone in the country.

"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 same information is looked after," said Simon McDougall.

"This whole saga of incompetence has been shocking and families in the Arun District are now rightly asking whether their personal details are safe.

"The National Identity Register, which the Government are setting 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 organised crime must make the Government stop and think again very seriously about their plan to store all the data they can on us on a central register.

"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 manage effectively mass databases of personal information.

"The Liberal Democrats opposed Identity Cards when the scheme went through Parliament. We said the scheme would be expensive, misguided and insecure. This latest debacle shows just what is at risk.

"That is why I have called for Gordon Brown 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."