Britain: ID cards go up in flames as 'database state' dismantled

ID cards and disk drives will be consigned to history. File photo / Thinkstock

Identity cards will be consigned to history today as the database recording the biometric details of thousands of people goes up in flames.

Hard disk drives from the national identity register, which underpinned the ID cards scheme, will be shredded and incinerated in a symbolic demonstration of efforts to rein back the "database state" and restore civil liberties.

It will be followed by measures to take innocent people off the national DNA database, introduce controls against the proliferation of CCTV cameras and cut councils' use of covert surveillance of residents.

Mandatory criminal record checks on millions of employees will be eased and wheel-clamping of cars on private land outlawed.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will hail the moves as evidence of the Liberal Democrats' influence on the Coalition's agenda. Sceptics will argue that the Government needs to be bolder in rolling back state intrusion and say it can be judged only by the impact of the measures on everyday life.

Five hundred hard-disk drives and 100 back-up tapes, containing the personal details of early ID card applicants, have already been electronically wiped. They will be taken to an Essex industrial estate to be shredded and the remains burned in a factory furnace in Birmingham.

Damian Green, the Home Office minister who will oversee the destruction, said in an interview with The Independent: "This is the final stake through the heart of the identity card scheme." He insisted the destruction went beyond its symbolic value: "This isn't just a one-off - it's a significant step on the Coalition Government's move towards greater freedom for the British people," he said.

The Protection of Freedoms Bill, to be published tomorrow, will pave the way to new controls on the collection and retention of DNA samples by police in England and Wales. Mr Green confirmed that the database would be "significantly narrowed" after becoming "much too large and much too undifferentiated".

At the moment, genetic material can be stored indefinitely, regardless of whether the individual who provided it is convicted. Samples from more than 1 million innocent people are stored. The Government will set out moves requiring police to destroy samples from people not charged or acquitted, unless they were arrested for violent offences. In those cases, it is likely police will be allowed to hold the material for only three years.

Mr Green's DNA was taken in 2008 after he was arrested briefly as an opposition MP for receiving leaked Whitehall documents. It took four months of "prodding by me and my solicitors" to have his sample destroyed. "There are many other completely innocent people who don't deserve to have their records kept forever, or certainly a long time, on the database," he said. "There will be completely respectable citizens who went through the same experience and never got it back."

Mr Green indicated that the Bill would regulate CCTV cameras, requiring councils to justify their use. He said he hoped the moves would reduce the estimated 4.5 million cameras recording citizens' movements.

"I only want to see CCTV cameras where I know they are doing some good, because if they aren't doing any good in terms of crime then they all they are intruding on people," Mr Green said. "There are many, many completely respectable people who have been to an extent radicalised by their experience of the state."

Guy Herbert, the general secretary of NO2ID, said: "I have no doubt coalition ministers' hearts are in the right place. But there's huge momentum in Whitehall for data-sharing and next month we will have the most intrusive census ever."

- INDEPENDENT