Tony Blair monthly press conference

Tony Blair monthly press conference; - Again, terrorists and criminals currently use false and multiple identities to avoid detection and also to launder money / For example one of the 11 September hijackers used some 30 different identities to obtain credit cards and somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million dollars worth of debt / That is one benefit - The second benefit is the improved protection we can offer to the most vulnerable / At the moment checking the identify of potential employees can be complex and it can be bureaucratic / The National Identity Register will allow people to know that their prospective, for example, child minder or carer is indeed the person that they claim to be / The criminal record can be searched rapidly and easily - Criminal detection is the third potential benefit / Over the past 50 years the detection rate halved / It has come back up again in the last 2 years but with the secure ID we can speed up these improvements / We will be able to compare, for example, some 900,000 outstanding crime scene marks with fingerprints held centrally - Then the fourth benefit is the prevention of fraud / There were somewhere in the region of 135,000 cases of identity fraud in 2005 with over 55,000 reported cases in the private sector / Identity fraud - the estimates vary - but roughly in the region of 1.7 billion pounds a year is what it has cost the country / And the value of major fraud cases in the Crown Courts is also at record level / In addition, when consumers are polled about this, around about 50 per cent of them feel that their identity is unsafe / One in ten say that they have been a victim of identity fraud / So in a sense at the moment the enterprising criminal has it fairly easy / Searching through the rubbish can provide the person with all that they need to steal an identity, but forging an ID card and a matching biometric record will obviously be quite another matter - So I think the benefits of a good identity sy...