ID Cards Cost To Every Council Tax Payer in Greater Manchester

Ahead of Greater Manchester's local elections on 1st May, local campaign group Manchester NO2ID is polling election candidates to highlight the cost of the National Identity Register at the local level. The published costings for the scheme, estimated at £10-20bn by the London School of Economics, does not include the cost to local authorities of reworking their computer systems to talk to the Government's central ID database, where over 50 categories of information will be stored on every resident along with a life-long audit track. Manchester co-ordinator Dave Page says "This is a local issue for these local elections. Councils will have to foot the IT bill, local police will waste time chasing after people who forget to tell the Government every time they move, and local people will be forced onto giant state databases, ripe for plundering by identity thieves. "Councils around the country, along with the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, have voted to keep their citizens safer from the Database State but so far only Bolton out of the Greater Manchester councils has done so. Manchester City Council has supported the scheme without even investigating the costs. Any candidate who does not oppose this expensive intrusion wants to waste your money and put you at the mercy of Government incompetence and bureaucracy." The group is sending the following questionnaire to every candidate in every ward in every local authority in Greater Manchester, and will highlight responses on their website which can be found by clicking here.

ID Questionnaire - sent to all candidates. You will no doubt be aware of the plan to introduce compulsory ID cards and a set of linked databases to manage a National Identity Scheme. As this is an issue that will affect each and every voter, I am sending you this short questionnaire so as to determine your position on the nationalisation of personal identity.

1) Do you support plans for a Home Office agency to track the life-history of every person over the age of 16 resident in your ward? YES/NO

2) Do you support expenditure of your authority's funds on integrating council computer systems with the Home Office identity management databases and verification charges for council services? YES/NO

3) Three dozen local authorities, the Welsh and London Assemblies and the Scottish Parliament have passed motions opposing the National Identity Scheme. If elected, would you oppose the National Identity Scheme by voting in council? http://manchester.no2id.net/

So far only three Tameside candidates have answered this questionnaire; two Lib Dems and one Labour. I myself am strongly opposed to compulsory ID cards. It would be interesting to see what the opinions of the candidates standing for election think on this issue. It would be good to hear not only how they feel on ID cards but why they feel the way they do on this important issue.
Tameside Citizen