Cllr Mike Cox - Gazette Article December 2007

7.31.27am GMT Mon 3rd Dec 2007

The Labour Government's recent data disaster where the personal details of 25 million parents and children were lost by the tax authorities, possibly falling into the hands of identity fraudsters shows why plans for Identity Cards must be scrapped.

The fiasco has shown the dangers of the Government holding huge amounts of information about each one of us whilst being slipshod in the way that information is kept.

This whole saga of incompetence has been shocking and families in Hillingdon are rightly asking whether their personal details are safe. The proposed National Identity Register will hold much more information on each one of us than the taxman managed to lose.

The possibilities for the loss of that information, either accidentally or through illegitimate means, must make the Government stop and think again seriously about their plan to store all the data they can on us on a central register.

This is a clear warning of the real dangers of a big brother state. State control of personal identity details is a real threat to our civil liberties. The Government should respond to the anger and abandon its ID card scheme. The Government cannot be trusted to manage effectively mass databases of personal information.

A debacle on this scale must give any government cause to think again. I would urge all our MP's to press the Government to end the ID card scheme for good and to ensure that we do not risk a personal data disaster on an even more catastrophic scale.