The only fraud in the latest figures being touted by Andy Burnham today is in the figures themselves. As with the £1.3bn figure last year, this is obfuscation with which to try and foist the identity cards and the national identity register on an increasingly sceptical nation. Indeed, the figures appear to have been plucked out of the air and have nothing to do with identity theft at all. A couple of examples worth mentioning, though, as they provide a modicum of amusement among the depressing dross:
Telecoms£372m – Telecoms not included in 2002 study. The cost of identity-related fraud is a substantial component of the total fraud/revenue loss in the telecoms sector.
Meaning what, exactly? Oh, I know, telecoms is a growing sector and it sounds all technical, let’s include that this year.
DVLA£2.5m – Estimated cost of operational activity required to help prevent abuse of the driving licence in identity crime.
Do me a favour! The DVLA is as incompetent and negligent as the home office when it comes to data management. They can’t even get peoples’ driving licences right.
Department for Constitutional Affairs£29.9m – Unpaid fines due to tracking problems – this is due
to a number of reasons including false information being provided to the Police.£5.9m – Unpaid fines due to identity problems i.e. many people issued with fines do not turn up at courts to verify their alleged name and address. Given this, courts find it difficult to enforce the payment of a fine because they are not certain the identity on the fine is a true identity (many fines get issued to fictitious identities or identities with inaccurate spellings).
Giving a false name to the police or not turning up to verify one’s address is not identity fraud – it is lying, plain and simple. There is nothing here to suggest that people are cloning identities (which is identity fraud) in order to avoid a parking fine.
However, all that aside, Burnham comes out with the usual claptrap that I’ve come to expect of a contemptible, lying shit trying to sell me a product I neither want nor need.
“Mr Burnham told Today there were “a range of things people can do to protect themselves” – but compulsory national identity cards would be “a major breakthrough”.”
Bollocks! They will be nothing of the sort. As is usual, this is a “solution” that desperately seeks a problem to fix – yet can’t actually fix anything. Unless you consider the option for the government to engage in mass surveillance of the UK population; then it makes remarkable sense.
When listening to any spokesperson from the home office and deciding whether what they have to say carries any credibility, it is as well to bear in mind that this is the same organisation that has just failed its audit following financial irregularities that would see anyone in a private sector orgnisation being sacked or even prosecuted. We are supposed to believe this twaddle?! From people who have comprehensively demonstrated their own incompetence?
Let’s look at Buffoon Burnham’s logic, shall we?
“We have all kinds of stand-in documents being called upon as identity documents – birth certificates, utility bills,” said the minister.”The truth is these do not prove identity.”
Quite right, they don’t. Neither does an identity card. Because, it is these very low level documents that will be used to populate the national identity register with its core information upon which to create the identity that the home office sees fit to bestow on us – the same incompetent home office that can’t manage its own accounts and has been criticized for its crime statistics. So, I guess, we will have to rely on those “background checks” the muddleheaded minister for mass surveillance wants to carry out. What will they be? And, given that there are something like 48 million adults, just how in-depth will they be and how long will it take? Crucially, will those checks be as thorough as the home office accounts and crime figures? And, given that biometrics won’t be a factor for Internet or cardholder not present transactions (which are not identity fraud anyway), how is it going to make any difference to them? The best way of securing our identities (apart from shredding sensitive documents) is to make sure that incompetent and corrupt government departments have absolutely nothing to do with them.
Paying the home office for an identity card will be like buying a used car from Arthur Daley or Del Boy Trotter. Indeed, I’d trust the accounting of those two over Burnham’s brigade any day.
Update: According to the government figures, the APACS losses are £504.8m and they give a breakdown. However, according to APACS only £36.9m is down to identity theft. The rest is just straightforward card fraud. Now, what was that about liars? So, as is usual, the home office is lying to us. Well, there’s a surprise. Anyone got Arthur Daley’s number, perchance?
If the Government continues to use such a spurious methodology for including figures such as the fixed overhead costs of enforcement e.g. checking foreign and UK passports, then they will have to add the “£584 million a year” cost to the Home Office of the ID Cards scheme.
None of these fixed enforcement overheads can be reduced by even a perfect UK ID Card scheme, as the people and resources will still need to be in place to check foreign passports and identity documents.
Therefore, at a stroke, the scheme would increase the “cost of identity fraud to the UK economy” ro over £2.3 villion a year, without having caught a single identity fraudster, serious criminal or terrorist.