Government denies passport fingerprinting plan

The government has denied claims that it is pushing forward its ID card scheme with plans to start fingerprinting passport applicants next year.

According to a report in The Guardian, from next year new adult passport applicants - of which there are around 600,000 a year - will have to attend an interview at a passport office, where they will be fingerprinted.

The newspaper claimed the police will be given the power to carry out checks against the national fingerprint database that will be created.

Mandatory fingerprinting would be a handy building block for the ID card scheme proposed by the government, but shelved in the run up to the election.

But the Home Office told silicon.com that no "formal decision whether to go ahead and include a second biometric" in the new 'ePassport' has been made.

In its business plan, published last month, the UK Passport Service said that fingerprint scans are likely to be incorporated into the passport chip later in the decade.

But the Home Office insists no date has been set for this, or for any other potential additional biometrics such as iris scans.

It said that by the end of this year, new passports will have a digital image of the passport photo stored on a chip.

And it said that the end of next year, first-time applicants will have to attend an interview - currently 90 per cent of applications are by post.

Only in later years will these interviews be used to take a second biometric, the Home Office added.