UK ID cards rollout hit by delay as launch date revealed

Target for Greater Manchester cards is missed

The controversial ID project has hit another delay, with the government missing its own deadline to get the cards into the hands of Manchester residents.

The Home Office announced today that people living or working in Manchester will now be able to enrol their details for an ID card from 30 November, with the first cards issued around 10 days after enrolment.

The new rollout date reveals how the government's schedule has slipped: volunteers living in the Greater Manchester area were originally due to be issued with the biometric identity cards in October. However, a Home Office spokesman admitted to silicon.com that the cards "were not issued" last month.

The missed deadline is laid out on the ID cards section of the government's public information website, Direct.gov.uk, which reads: "Identity cards will be issued in selected locations first, starting in the Greater Manchester area in October 2009".

Take-up of the cards in Manchester is likely to be low, with Home Office figures showing just 0.4 per cent of the population of Manchester - fewer than 2,000 of the city's 450,000 residents - having registered to get an application form for an ID card.

Manchester residents aren't the first UK citizens to be able to enrol for the cards: civil servants and contractors working on the ID cards scheme have been able to apply for an ID card from 20 October.

As the "application process [for ID cards] began in October" for civil servants, some of whom are based in Manchester, a Home Office spokesman denied there had been a delay to the rollout of the cards.

He described the difference between beginning the application process and actually issuing ID cards as "semantics".

The setback in delivering cards to Manchester residents was criticised by the Liberal Democrat Manchester Withington MP John Leech.

"The government's failure to issue any cards whatsoever despite their October target is symptomatic of the scheme as a whole. It has been a farcical process throughout, full of prevarication and clothed in secrecy," he said.

"I would like to see the system as a whole scrapped. This bungled policy has already proved to be an expensive, embarrassing nightmare for the Labour party," he added.

Dr Gus Hosein, senior fellow at the London School of Economics and co-author of a book on the ID card scheme entitled Global Challenges for Identity Policies, said the scheme has been plagued by over-optimistic deadlines.

"It is a slow motion car crash. Back in 2006 when the Identity Act was passed you had ministers talking about issuing the first cards within a year or two," he said.

"The biggest problem is that every month they delay the deployment of the card there is a knock-on effect on their wider adoption.

"Before it will become useful for banks, shops or government departments to sign up to the scheme there will have to be at least one to two million people with the cards.

"At this rate it is going to be in the 2020s before we reach that point and the scheme gets going."

The delay to the Manchester rollout is the latest in a long line of setbacks for the £4.6bn scheme: in July this year the government dropped plans to force new airport workers at Manchester and London to get ID cards following opposition from airport unions, while plans to make the cards compulsory were also formally shelved earlier this year.