The legislation further said that those renewing or applying for passports must be entered on to the NIR.The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition formed following the 2010 general election announced that the ID card scheme would be scrapped.

[16] Labour's manifesto for the 2005 general election stated that, if returned to power, they would "introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports".

In contrast, the Liberal Democrat manifesto opposed the idea because, they claimed, ID cards "don't work",[17] while the Conservatives made no mention of the issue.

In December 2005, the Conservative Party elected a new leader, future Prime Minister David Cameron, who opposed ID cards in principle.

[28] The Home Office announced that it would publish an ID management action plan in the months from November 2006, followed by agreements with departments on their uses for the system.

[33] In March 2008, the Home Secretary announced that people could choose to have an identity card, a passport, or both when they became available (although they could not opt out of having their details recorded on the NIR).

[35] On 1 August 2008, it was confirmed that Thales Group was awarded a four-year contract to work on the design, building, testing and operation of the National Identity Scheme.

[37] A Home Office minister, Meg Hillier, said that they would be a "convenient way for young people to prove their age when going to bars" and at £30 they were cheaper than purchasing passports (£77.50 at the time).

[43][44] The Manchester Evening News revealed in 2010 that senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards, because of fears about the level of demand.

[45] Originally called the Identity Card for Foreign Nationals which was blue and pink in colour,[46] was continued and renamed the Biometric Residence Permit, still issued as of 2024.

[54] In the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition agreement that followed the 2010 general election, the new government announced that they planned to scrap the ID card scheme, including the National Identity Register (as well as the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint database), as part of their measures "to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.

It is possible to take a small measure of how the national identity scheme was received from remarks by the historian A. J. P. Taylor in his English History, 1914–1945, where he describes the whole thing as an "indignity" and talks of the Home Guard "harassing" people for their cards.

After the defeat of the Labour Government in the general election of October 1951 the incoming Conservative administration of Winston Churchill was pledged to get rid of the scheme, "to set the people free", in the words of one minister.

Cheers rang out when on 21 February 1952 the Minister for Health, Harry Crookshank, announced in the House of Commons that national identity cards were to be scrapped.

This was a popular move, adopted against the wishes of the police and the security services, though the decision to repeal the 1939 legislation was, in significant part, driven by the need for economies.

The ICAO has recommended that all countries adopt biometric passports, and the United States has made it a requirement for entering the US under the visa waiver programme.

The Home Office's Identity Cards Benefits Overview document[65] described how the IRN would have enabled data sharing amongst police, legal and corporate databases (including bank and travel operators).

Lord Carlile was appointed after 11 September attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 to independently review the working of the Terrorism Act 2000 and subsequent anti-terrorist laws.

[88] Talking on GMTV on 29 January 2006, he expressed his views on the proposed legislation, saying[89] that ID cards could be of limited value in the fight against terrorism but that Parliament had to judge that value against the curtailment of civil liberties.

[citation needed] Tony McNulty, Home Office minister who was responsible for the scheme, responded by saying a "ceiling" on costs would be announced in October 2005.

[42] The then Home Secretary David Blunkett stated in 2004 said the cards would stop people using multiple identities and boost the fight against terrorism and organised crime.

However, human rights group Liberty disputed this, pointing out that the existence of another form of ID cards in Spain did not prevent the Madrid train bombings.

At his opening speech for Infosecurity Europe on 27 April 2009, he stepped back from the concept of a full National Identity Database for every citizen, saying it would be sufficient to improve the verification of passports.

[100][101][102] His successor, Charles Clarke, said that ID cards "cannot stop attacks", in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, and added that he doubted it would have prevented the atrocities.

In their January 2005 report[105] on the Bill, the Commission for Racial Equality stated that the fear of discrimination is neither misconceived nor exaggerated, and note that this is also an ongoing issue in Germany, the Netherlands and France.

In a press release on 30 July 2004,[108] Richard Thomas the Information Commissioner's Office stated that a NIR raised substantial data protection and personal privacy concerns.

For example, Gordon Brown was reported to be "planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

"[111] Francis Elliott reporting on the development for The Independent noted that "police could be alerted as soon as a wanted person used a biometric-enabled cash card or even entered a building via an iris-scan door".

[114][115] Home Office forecasts envisaged that "265 government departments and as many as 48,000 accredited private sector organisations" would have had access to the database, and that 163 million identity verifications or more would take place each year.

Minister Meg Hillier, in a letter to The Spectator magazine, claimed that as the ID card would not have someone's address on it, it would protect such a person's privacy in a way currently unavailable.