Lack of "balls" in Whitehall will hinder ID cards

And risk of mistakes may be too high to chance...

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former chairwoman of defence technology and security company QinetiQ, has questioned the wisdom of the UK ID card scheme, saying the current government lacks "the balls" to make the scheme mandatory.

Neville-Jones, also a former foreign office civil servant, said the government will instead force people to accept the cards by making it too problematic not to have one.

She told silicon.com: "I don't think the government has the balls to force people. They will sell this to us as voluntary but make it so inconvenient for us not to have one.

"They can make something which is voluntary incredibly difficult to live without."

She added the main reason given for introducing the cards - the threat of terrorism - is fundamentally flawed.

"I am unhappy about the way the debate is developing in the UK," she said. "The whole thing has been set up in a terrorism context and that's wrong."

Neville-Jones added there is a very real danger of disenfranchising innocent people with 'false positives' - people being told they aren't who they say they are.

She said: "The requirement for 100 per cent accuracy is huge and I don't think we've ever seen a system which is 100 per cent accurate.

"We could get to a situation where we have something incredibly intrusive but also incredibly ineffective."