ABSTRACT
This chapter opens by looking at the government’s plans to broaden and deepen its use of the extant data held in its system of driving licences. These are important not only because of their very prosaic nature, but also because the plans that were spun around these licences reveal a lot about the impetus behind the government’s push for population data. The plans developed by these Conservative governments, centred on a new photo-bearing format for UK-wide driving licences, snowballed dramatically and formed the basis of attempts to introduce national ID cards. This country-wide attempted reform was explicitly built on the example of the licences already in use in Northern Ireland, and the situation in this corner of the United Kingdom is examined in the second section of this chapter. The third section analyses how this discussion of how the licence could become an ID card escalated with suggestions that, were a UK ID card turned into a smart card, it could be used to access both public and private sector services. The increasing suggestions of private sector involvement in this scheme revealed the extent to which these plans were rooted in government perceptions of, and its involvement in, the increasing commercialisation of data.
