Report - Guardian

The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005 111Another strategy involves the increased monitoring of stolen documents. The CabinetOffice notes the case of the Netherlands, which at the time of writing the report, did nothave a national identity card.The Netherlands has no unique identifier for its 16 million citizens,probably because of a widespread antipathy towards identity cardsresulting from historical resonance from World War II occupation.But it does have well developed systems for keeping track of stolenand lost documents: the Verification of Identity System (VIS). 298Details of around six million documents are held in the central database. This databasecan also be accessed by private sector organisations. This is a far more proportionatesolution: monitoring the minority of documents for a minority of citizens based on thefact that a crime has occurred, rather than monitoring the general population in theeventuality of a crime. It is also technologically feasible.The Home Office Identity Fraud Standing Committee has an excellent website,www.identity-theft.org.uk, detailing common sense advice, on how to prevent andrecover from identity fraud. If all citizens followed this advice, there would be a muchreduced need for alternative solutions, such as the government’s proposed identity cardsand a national identity database. Promoting the contents of this website would be amuch cheaper, safer and more proportionate solution to the problem. And untilappropriate research is conducted on the nature of the threat of ‘identity theft’, it wouldbe hazardous to create a massive ‘solution’ to a poorly understood problem.298 Cabinet Office report, page 40.