The £4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.
The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the legislation reaching the statute book.
Abolishing the cards and associated register will be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards.
The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.
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The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total £1bn.
The publication of the identity documents bill today marks the end of an eight-year Whitehall struggle over compulsory identity cards since they were first floated by the then-home secretary David Blunkett in the aftermath of 9/11.
More than 5.4m combined passport and identity cards were due to be issued when the scheme was started in earnest next year. This was projected to rise to 10m ID cards/passports being issued ever year from 2016 onwards.
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A separate scheme under which identity cards are issued to all foreign nationals resident in Britain by 2015 run by the United Kingdom Border Agency is still to go ahead. Home Office ministers said yesterday this was a separate scheme for biometric residence permits for foreign nationals that was required by European Union legislation.
May said: "This bill is the first step of many that this government is taking to reduce the control of the state over decent, law-abiding people and hand power back to them.
"With swift parliamentary approval, we aim to consign identity cards and the intrusive ID card scheme to history within 100 days."
The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said: "The wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive ID card system represents everything that has been wrong with government in recent years."
The legislation published today will give the Home Office the power to scrap ID cards within a month of its reaching the statute book and to cancel its underlying database, the national identity register. All the data currently held on the national identity register will also be destroyed within a month of royal assent.
The next generation of "biometric" passports is also due to be cancelled. They were due to include electronic fingerprints alongside the existing digitised photograph already included in chips in the latest passports.
May 28, 2010
