Swap ID cards for police wireless handhelds, say LibDems

Liberal Democrats have unveiled plans to scrap biometric ID cards and instead spend the money on speech recognition-enabled handheld computers for the police.

The Liberal Democrats calculate that scrapping ID cards will save £500m, and want to spend the money on more police and technology to help officers spend more time on the beat, if they win the general election.

The party said that out of an officer's average eight-hour shift, only 90 minutes will be spent on the beat, with the rest taken up with form-filling.

"The priority should be to get the police as mobile as possible," a Liberal Democrat spokesman told silicon.com.

The party said that if elected it will give police an extra £150m in the first year of the parliament to boost existing IT budgets.

It wants to give officers handheld computers connected to the Airwave network, equipped with speech recognition technology already in use in hospitals, to help officers fill in forms on the move.

"The NHS is increasingly using this [speech recognition] and it seems to us to be the sort of thing that could be a great help to the police," he added.

The party said it would also improve on the "disastrous procurements" that have dogged police IT, and also speed up key national technology projects such as the case and custody system, which will allow police and prosecution teams to share case files electronically.

The rollout of the £2.9bn Airwave police radio communications system has been completed to all forces in England, Scotland and Wales on time and on budget. Developing Airwave to offer more data services is already part of the plans set out by the Police IT Organisation.