ID cards.

I have my alcohol licence which I carry daily, others have driving licences, others age varification. cards, others bus/train. passes.

not sure we need them, most people have photo ID already in some form thry carry on them.
 
moomba said:
I cant go a week without losing my bankcard. If I have to carry an ID card around with me everywhere I go I'll be fucked.

FWIW I have a national identity card. And have no problems with that. But why would you want people to carry them around unless your going to start checking people on the street.
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You could have it tattooed on your forearm you know? The ID card that is, not the bank card.
 
PragueBlue said:
In every country I have ever lived, except for the UK, I have been required to have an ID card. I really don't see any problem with them at all.
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Me neither. I've already got three ID cards - passport, driving licence 'n bus pass! But as there are thousands of fake documents I don't suppose if dodgy characters needed one they couldn't buy one!
 
In the US, a drivers license doubles as ID. If you don’t drive you can apply for a drivers license that is endorsed as a non driver. Simple.
 
They would be beneficial, for example, when opening a bank account; you would no longer need to find 32 different pieces of paper to prove your existence, some of which many people do not have. (Believe it or not, not everyone has a valid passport. Not everyone has a driving licence, and before very long, many of us old gits will be barred from having one.) It would solve the ID for voting at a stroke and make it equitable, not, as at present, biased towards old people and against young ones.

It would also help sort the black economy and stop abuse of the NHS by non-Brits. At least it would if anyone could be arsed to enforce the rules, which is a real weakness of this country. We would rather whine like little girls than set up robust systems to prevent piss-taking.
 
PragueBlue said:
In every country I have ever lived, except for the UK, I have been required to have an ID card. I really don't see any problem with them at all.
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Me too. But equally, as a foreigner, I've not had one in any of the countries I've lived in and I've managed to do everything I needed to. I had one in Malaysia for a while, but during covid, they stopped issuing them. I'd say the form factor was better than bringing your passport everywhere (but no different to a driving licence) but other than that, I didn't see any real benefit. Maybe there are some efficiencies or cost savings at a government level, but I've not seen any arguments that this is the case. Everything I've seen says it's massively expensive to implement, and if it was helping save any money, then they'd presumably be able to hand them out for free.

I'm currently in Vietnam, where again they don't issue ID cards to foreigners, but the latest move is to switch all citizens to a government app on your phone to replace the physical ID cards. And at that point, there are all sorts of genuine questions raised. Who's developing and running the app? What data does it collect? Who has access to that data? How secure is it? And with a regime that combines authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence, it could be a very dangerous move. And just on a practical level, you get pulled over by the traffic police and your phone is out of battery, what happens? Your phone gets stolen, what happens?
 
BrianW said:
It would also help sort the black economy and stop abuse of the NHS by non-Brits. At least it would if anyone could be arsed to enforce the rules, which is a real weakness of this country. We would rather whine like little girls than set up robust systems to prevent piss-taking.
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That's a relatively simple question though. How much would it cost and how much would it save?

Estimates of something like £300-400 million per year is lost from treating people who aren't eligible for NHS treatment and whose costs are not able to be recovered (incidentally, I've brought my foreign wife over twice and at no point have we been asked to show any sort of insurance for the trip). 20 years ago, official estimates put the annual cost of running ID cards at close to £600m per year, but that didn't include all costs. In the same year, the London School of Economics estimated it at between £10bn and £20bn over 10 years. So even at 2005 costs, we're looking at £1-2bn per year to save £300-400m in NHS costs, which could presumably be saved in much cheaper ways. In reality, you can probably double those estimates at least.

And this is assuming that ID cards actually stop this sort of thing. A bloke is rushed to hospital in an ambulance and when he gets there, it turns out he doesn't have an ID card with him. He could be a foreigner scrounging some free NHS treatment, or he could be someone who left his ID card at home. Are they just going to refuse treatment? A student comes over and because of a backlog in the system (hard to imagine, I know), it takes her a couple of months to get her ID card sent out. She's paid the NHS surcharge of over £1000. In the meantime, she's sick. Is she not getting the treatment she's paid for because her ID card isn't sorted? There will always be people with legitimate reasons for not having their ID card on them. Every time it needs renewing for a start. And because of that, NHS staff will always air on the side of caution and people will still get treatment they're not entitled to.
 
BrianW said:
They would be beneficial, for example, when opening a bank account; you would no longer need to find 32 different pieces of paper to prove your existence, some of which many people do not have. (Believe it or not, not everyone has a valid passport. Not everyone has a driving licence, and before very long, many of us old gits will be barred from having one.) It would solve the ID for voting at a stroke and make it equitable, not, as at present, biased towards old people and against young ones.

It would also help sort the black economy and stop abuse of the NHS by non-Brits. At least it would if anyone could be arsed to enforce the rules, which is a real weakness of this country. We would rather whine like little girls than set up robust systems to prevent piss-taking.
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The abuse of the NHS by foreigners visiting could be stopped today without ID cards if they could be arsed to enforce the rules that exist now.
 
I'm With Stupid said:
Me too. But equally, as a foreigner, I've not had one in any of the countries I've lived in and I've managed to do everything I needed to. I had one in Malaysia for a while, but during covid, they stopped issuing them. I'd say the form factor was better than bringing your passport everywhere (but no different to a driving licence) but other than that, I didn't see any real benefit. Maybe there are some efficiencies or cost savings at a government level, but I've not seen any arguments that this is the case. Everything I've seen says it's massively expensive to implement, and if it was helping save any money, then they'd presumably be able to hand them out for free.

I'm currently in Vietnam, where again they don't issue ID cards to foreigners, but the latest move is to switch all citizens to a government app on your phone to replace the physical ID cards. And at that point, there are all sorts of genuine questions raised. Who's developing and running the app? What data does it collect? Who has access to that data? How secure is it? And with a regime that combines authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence, it could be a very dangerous move. And just on a practical level, you get pulled over by the traffic police and your phone is out of battery, what happens? Your phone gets stolen, what happens?
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What if you don’t have a smart phone?
 
denislawsbackheel said:
The abuse of the NHS by foreigners visiting could be stopped today without ID cards if they could be arsed to enforce the rules that exist now.
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What are the rules as it stands? Like how does it work?

If I go to an NHS GP, I have to be registered, but if I go to the hospital, I just get treated. Having said that, I've only ever been to one hospital in the UK and it was one I was born with, so maybe I'm on record there. How do they know if someone is a tourist rather than a resident? Do honest tourists pay out of pocket and then claim on their insurance, do they apply for an insurance guarantee, or does the NHS do the claim for them? And what happens if the NHS treats someone and then the insurance refuses to pay out?
 
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