Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will consider the cost and method of introducing a secure national identity number, with electronic links to a centrally held register of biometric data, for all UK citizens.

In 2010 the Coalition Government decided to scrap the National Identity Register which would have used a National Identity Number to link individuals to a range of data items, including biometric data, that would have been collected and stored in a central database. This decision was taken because the National Identity Register was both expensive and represented a substantial erosion of civil liberties and this Government is not planning to revisit that decision.