Business holds key to ID card success

The government is seeing widespread interest from the business community over how the private sector could make use of national identity (ID) cards, according to the civil servant in charge of the controversial scheme.

Speaking at a conference on electronic ID cards in Brussels organised by eBusiness lobby group Eema, Katherine Courtney, director of the UK ID card programme, said the government had been in consultation with both the public and private sector to develop usage cases for the proposed cards.

She added that there had been there had been strong interest from the business community, and in particular the banking sector which is investigating using ID cards to verify customers' identities. "The banks are looking to do this anyway, either by issuing [their own] card readers for customers or collaborating as an industry [to tackle fraud], but they would rather work with government [on a national identity scheme]," she said.