“The General Register Office, which oversees the registration of births and deaths, is to become part of the Identity and Passport Service in a move that is likely to see sharply increased data sharing between the two bodies.”

This is, or should be, the story of the week.

“The government plans to give IPS staff online access to births and deaths information which could be cross checked with ID card or passport applications. Data sharing between the two bodies was given a legal basis in July by an order made under section 38 of the Identity Cards Act.”

In the story linked to above, Phil Booth of No2ID makes the badly needed points, and I doubt if he’ll mind if he’s quoted at length:

“But Phil Booth, national coordinator of the No2ID campaign monitoring the government’s ID card and data sharing plans, described the merger as “chilling.”

It was “deeply worrying” that the GRO, a “formerly independent agency should be subsumed in this way, with no debate and for no apparent reason other than bureaucratic convenience,’ he said.

Birth and death dates might form part of an individual’s official identity, but register offices also recorded other information such as details about parents, Booth pointed out.

“The ID program is insinuating itself deeper and deeper into people’s lives. This is not so much ‘feature creep’ as a blatant land-grab of personal identity.

“That an agency which until a little over a year ago was limited to issuing passports is now grabbing control of citizen data from cradle to grave, and openly talks about ‘registration of life events,’ confirms what NO2ID has said all along. It’s not about ID cards, but the creation of a detailed, lifelong government dossier on every person,” Booth said.

He added “And that this sits in the dysfunctional and acquisitive culture of the Home Office should certainly make people think twice.”