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On March 26th the Government will be opening the first group of ‘Investigation Centres’ for passport applicants. The Sheffield centre will open on Charter Row, and other centres are planned across the country.

These centres will be used for what the government is calling “Authentication by Interview”. The interview will demand official numbers, addresses for the last few years and your educational institutions.

That information will be used to look up everything that can be found out about you on all the government and private sector databases they can lay their hands on including school records, social services, police, credit checking and family details. This will enable the government to build a single dossier on you containing personal information.

Over the next year every new applicant will be called in to their nearest interrogation centre. There you will be fingerprinted and photographed, and put through what they describe as an ‘intrusive interview’ to check that you can give answers about private details of your life that agree with the official ones. If you can, you’ll get your passport. If not… it is not clear, but trying to get a passport under ‘false pretences’ - if the computer says “no” - could be quite serious.

UK Independence Party spokesman Jonathan Arnott said, “The government has already estimated that 1 in 4 applicants will have to cancel their trip because they don’t get their passport in time. Apart from the obvious civil liberties issue, depriving people of their holidays because of an under-funded system is yet another government disaster”

And Yorkshire’s UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom added “It is true that the Labour Party is the only one that supports ID cards, but anybody who applies for a new passport between now and the end of this government will have their files kept forever. The answer is simple. Apply for a passport now, or risk the government holding all your information on file”.

The UK Independence Party is a member of the cross-party NO2ID campaign.

See here and here for more information.