According to reports, Dame Stella, who was speaking at an annual conference for the Association of Colleges in Birmingham, said that, personally, she did not think that “anybody in the intelligence services, particularly in my former service, would be pressing for ID cards.”
"My angle on ID cards is that they may be of some use but only if they can be made unforgeable and all our other documentation is quite easy to forge,” she said. “If we have ID cards at vast expense and people can go into a back room and forge them they are going to be absolutely useless.”
Politicians and activists alike seized on her remarks.
"When someone of Stella Rimmington's experience expresses these doubts, the government should listen and abandon this scheme before wasting any more taxpayers money," Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman told the BBC.
Prospective Tory leader and shadow home secretary David Davis called the Government’s rationale for ID cards “completely bogus”.
"What she has demonstrated is that they will be a spectacular and probably counter-productive waste of money an unnecessary incursion on people's privacy," he said, according to the Independent.
Phil Booth, National Coordinator for campaign group No2ID said the scheme had been reduced to “just a lot of hot air”.
The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman, speaking at a daily press briefing yesterday, played down the remarks, stressing that Stella Rimington retired from her post with MI5 in 1996 and was expressing a personal opinion.
He denied that the Government was shifting away from the security argument as a rationale for ID cards.
Dame Stella’s comments came in the middle of a House of Lords debate on the draft Bill. On Wednesday peers approved an amendment that that would restrict the occasions on which a person could be obliged to prove his identity.
The amendment states that only those who “reasonably require proof” of the Government’s plans for a national identity card scheme have been under heavy fire in recent weeks.
Only last week the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform, which considers whether powers being granted to Government legislation are subject to sufficient scrutiny, concluded that Parliamentary scrutiny of the ID Card Bill needs to be enhanced. It described powers being sought in the Bill by the Home Secretary as "inappropriate."
Reports issued recently by three other Select Committees – the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Constitution Committee and the Home Affairs Select Committee – also criticised the substance of the Government’s plans.
