For some peculiar or devious reason, the unpopular and inept Labour government is, yet again extending its hugely wasteful, "voluntary" ID Cards / National Identity Register centralised biometric database scheme to the North West of England, but also encroaching on parts of Wales and Scotland

Were the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Executive, the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government consulted on this decision by the politicians and civil servants in Westminster ?

Presumably the "success criterion", which they have used to give the go ahead for this next phase of the rollout of the scheme, is simply the fact that the citizens of Manchester have not actually bothered to rise up and burn down the local Identity and Passport Service offices.

They have, instead,by all accounts simply not been interested in submitting to this "voluntary" scheme, and the Government has resorted to unsubstantiated propaganda statements about how "useful" these ID cards are meant to be, without daring to provide any quantitative evidence of their "success".

Even if the Manchester area ID Cards rollout had somehow been a huge success, it would still be too early to properly evaluate this as a pilot scheme after it had been running for only15 days from the 30th of November 2009.

However, on 15th December 2009, Meg "I've left my ID Card at home" Hillier, the hapless junior Home Office Minister, who has been lumbered with the task of pretending to believe in the the scheme, has signed another Order, which extends the Post Code Lottery to inflict the "voluntary" National Identity Scheme on the rest of the people in North West England from the 4th January 2010.

Statutory Instruments 2009 No. 3323 (C. 150) Identity Cards The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Commencement No. 6) Order 2009 [..] Commencement 2.--(1) Section 2(1) and (2), and section 5(1)(b), of the Identity Cards Act 2006 shall come into force on 4th January 2010 in relation to any person to whom paragraph (2) applies, except to the extent that those provisions are already in force in respect of such persons.



What is the rate determining steps, or the critical resources which are behind this staggered rollout of the "voluntary" National Identity Scheme ?

It cannot be Training of Travel Company Staff to recognise and accept what the new ID Cards look like, simply on the printed "look and feel".

Without looking it up online, can you tell at a glance, which of the 3 colour schemes (

turquoise and green, blue and pink, lilac and salmon) has been arbitrarily chosen for the 3 types of ID Card, (identity card for British citizens, identification card for EU or EEA citizens living in the UK, Identity card for foreign nationals) and whether or not they are valid for foreign travel ?

There is still no online Verification Service in operation for private sector companies to be able to actually check the biometrics or to check that the information on the contactless / RFID chip has not been tampered with or forged.

There are no Biometric Readers linked to the National identity Scheme anywhere except in the Home Office's IT sub-contractor's testing laboratories and, presumably, in the couple of ID card applicant interrogation centres.

The new ID Card Post Code Lottery will now cover these areas:

