Passports are issued by the UK Passport Office, and driving licenses by the DVLA (Driving & Vehicles Licensing Association). These are both effectively government agencies.
However, as having a passport or a driving license is not compulsory, there were plans to have a national identity card, as is the case in many European countries that would be compulsory for all adults. This has fairly recently been scrapped before it was ever adopted. Partly because the cost ended up being estimated at £18B (US$30B). Quite how a database and some photo cards of 60M people(less if you only include adults) would cost that much is a mystery that only governments can solve!
* First up we gotta biometrically scan every citizen of the United Kingdom for starters. That's 64 million people.
- Scanners
- Appointment Management
- Advertising Campaigns (to remind people to register/go)
- Chasing people who aren't registered
* Then for that to make sense you need to be able to validate people in places.
- Invest in technology to biometrically match people (readers etc)
- Train users/operators
- Handle the kinks in that tech (complaints, false positives).
- Handle any legal issues.
- Create the back end system to auth (somewhat non trivial)
- Load balance
- Security Checks, Penetration testing, etc, etc. No point in the whole system if its easily spoofed, right?
Then of course we need to produce the cards and send all the cards to those 64 million people. Also this system is supposed to integrate with existing government systems. You can imagine what I nightmare that probably was going to be.
My point being that its only a database and some photocards in the sense that I can write Stackoverflow in a weekend ;).
Tbh your belief that it was only photocards means that you probably didn't appreciate the full scope of the legislation. It actually sickened me how the entire focus of the debate on the ID system was on the cards when they were the least important aspect of it.
If I wore a tin-foil hat i'd even go so far as to suggest that politicians intentionally focused on the card part of it to divert our attention from the rest of it.
There are identifying documents, such as passports, drivers licenses and credit cards. These are sufficient for any situation where you might need to verify an identity.
