UK Gov "Forgot" To Buy Readers For Its Biometric ID Cards

The controversial Biometric ID cards have already been issued since the beginning of November 2008 to foreign residents living in UK but it seems that no electronic readers have been deployed yet to access data stored on them. According to UK tech website, Silicon, 50,000 cards will have been issued by April this year but the police and immigration control have yet to receive hardware capable of retrieving the data including fingerprints, photos and related pieces of information. The details, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, show that the minister in charge of the £4.7 billion project, Meg Hillier, cannot give a clear timetable as to when the card readers will be available. It is also understood that, not only police forces have to rely on traditional methods for checking the Identity of the ID Cardholders but they will also have to allocate part of their already strained budgets to invest in the machines. It is therefore unsurprising that the Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling crucified the current government by saying "Once again ministers have shown that the ID card project is absolutely farcical. What is the point of spending billions of pounds on cards that can't be read in the UK?"

Source: http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2009/02/07/uk-gov-forgot-buy-readers-its-biometric-id-cards/