Identity Cards Act 2006

Identity Cards Act 2006^{[Note 1]}

Act of Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Long title	An Act to make provision for a national scheme of registration of individuals and for the issue of cards capable of being used for identifying registered individuals; to make it an offence for a person to be in possession or control of an identity document to which he is not entitled, or of apparatus, articles or materials for making false identity documents; to amend the Consular Fees Act 1980; to make provision facilitating the verification of information provided with an application for a passport; and for connected purposes.
Citation	2006 c. 15
Dates
Royal assent	30 March 2006
Repealed	21 January 2011
Other legislation
Repealed by	Section 1, Identity Documents Act 2010
Status: Repealed
History of passage through Parliament
Text of statute as originally enacted
Revised text of statute as amended

The Identity Cards Act 2006 (c. 15) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that was repealed in 2011. It created National Identity Cards, a personal identification document and European Economic Area travel document, which were voluntarily issued to British citizens. It also created a resident registry database known as the National Identity Register (NIR), which has since been destroyed. In all around 15,000 National Identity Cards were issued until the act was repealed in 2011. The Identity Card for Foreign nationals was continued in the form of Biometric Residence Permits after 2011 under the provisions of the UK Borders Act 2007 and the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009.^[1][2]

The introduction of the scheme by the Labour government was much debated, and civil liberty concerns focused primarily on the database underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves. The Act specified fifty categories of information that the National Identity Register could hold on each citizen. The legislation further said that those renewing or applying for passports must be entered on to the NIR.

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition formed after the 2010 general election announced that the ID card scheme would be scrapped.^[3][4] The Identity Cards Act was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010 on 21 January 2011, and the cards were invalidated with no refunds to purchasers.^[5]

Nobody in the UK is required to carry any form of ID. Therefore, driving licences and passports are the most widely used ID documents in the United Kingdom. Young people are able to apply and be issued a provisional driving licence usually without any preconditions, and under most circumstances can be used as ID in the same way as a standard driving licence. Utility bills are used the primary document as evidence of residency.^[6][7][8] Authorities and police generally don't make spot checks of identification for individuals, although they may do so in instances of arrest.

Cite error: There are <ref group=Note> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=Note}} template (see the help page).