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• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

A little while ago I went to an exhibition at the Building Federation. They were showing what I can only call an updated pre-fabricated house. It was actually a flat. It had a steel frame and it was was in situ, inside this frame. The frame could be put on the back of a lorry and taken to a site and bolted together. You could construct, effectively, a block of flats in modular fashion and all you had to do, having plonked it there, was to connect up electricity and water. The whole thing was centrally heated, and worked just...

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 15 June 2005

The database to have to handle this would be massive. The problems of simply creating that database would be huge, and those people, the human link that would have to look after it, would be open to blackmail or inducements by criminal elements.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 15 June 2005

The biometrics have to be foolproof is what you are saying?

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 15 June 2005

Sir Ian (Blair), thank you. My point is that having ID cards did not stop the Madrid bombings; having ID cards has not stopped bombings in Russia; the 9/11 hijackers all had valid documents and were able to get into the US; and they did not prevent any of those things, and yet the Government used the argument of having ID cards to justify the whole process, that ID cards would have prevented these when they brought them in. I remember David Blunkett (former Home Secretary) saying it in Parliament.

• Reference: 2005/0165-1
• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 15 June 2005

At the London Assembly plenary last December, Commander Mick Messinger was unable to point to any evidence to support the view that ID cards are of any use in the fight against terrorism. Is the Commissioner aware of any such evidence?