The government plans to spend £1.2bn onbiometrictechnology and staff to catch illegal immigrants and others
undesirables at UK borders. But it has postponed aframework procurement programmefor a
national identity card.
The first contract for iris recognition equipment, worth £2.8m,
has gone to French defence and security equipment supplier Sagem.
Two units will be installed at Heathrow Airport's new Terminal 5,
and more may be installed at other entry points, the Home Office
said.
By the end of 2007 frontline staff at all major ports will be
able to check biometric data in travel documents against the
passenger presenting the document. it said.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said, "We are creating a new
frontline (e-Borders) with police-like powers focused on securing
the UK's borders against terrorism, illegal immigration and
organised crime."
The cost of passports has more than doubled over the last two
years. The Home Office
said no new money will be raised to implement the e-Borders system.
"Our new visa charging arrangements give us the financial
flexibility to make these commitments," it said.
e-Borders will help give effect to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's
national
security strategy announced last week.
The PM said all visa applicants will need biometric visas within
nine months. Immigrants from high-risk countries already need
biometric visas.
Commercial carriers and owner/operators of all vessels will have
to submit detailed passenger, service and crew data before they
leave for the UK. This will be checked against watch-lists,
analysed, risk-assessed and shared between the Border &
Immigration Agency, Customs, Police and UK Visas UK border
agencies, the Home Office said.
Mr Brown said UK citizens would carry biometric ID cards from
2009 and foreign nationals coming to the UK for more than six
months will need a biometric ID from the end of 2008. This would
"prevent people already in the country using multiple identities
for terrorist, criminal or other purposes", he said.
However, James Hall, head of the Identity and Passport Service,
said government was not yet moving forward on a tender to run a
procurement programme for the national ID card. The tender was
issued in April and closed at the end of June.
"We had hoped to have started by now, but the time is not
right," he said, Hall added he did not have a time scale for when
there would be further movement on the contract.
The biometric part of the pilot e-Border project, Semaphore,
follows-on from the
miSense project to
use biometrics and document scanners to authenticate passengers and
control their movements that ended earlier this year.
Now implemented at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, Semaphore has
led to 1,050 arrests for different offences, the government
said.
Immigration authorities recorded 29 million passenger movements
in and out of the UK in 2006. This led to 13,000 individuals being
flagged for further checks and the subsequent arrests.
The new technology lets immigration staff scan biometric data in
new e-passports. This will give them more confidence about the
identity of people entering the UK, while allowing fraud and
forgery checks to be undertaken quickly and securely, the
government claimed.
The new equipment includes a portable iris recognition
immigration system (IRIS), fingerprinting and passport scanning
technology. Over 100,000 travellers have enrolled on a live demo
IRIS system at Heathrow.
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