The price of ID cards

sir – Philip Johnston says that he doesn’t want an ID card, but that he could live with having a unique personal number (Comment, April 25).

We can rely on the Prime Minister not to reintroduce ID cards, as her first job as Home Secretary was to repeal Labour’s Identity Cards Act. This also meant dismantling and destroying the national identity register that would have been used to track us across public services.

Requiring a unique personal number in order to access public services would be just as offensive as having an ID card. Such a system would be subject to function creep as government incrementally attached more and more information to the personal number, thus creating a Facebook-style detailed picture of who we are.

The Windrush problem has revealed that it is entirely reasonable to expect the Home Office to determine immigration status correctly without prescribing documents, such as a passport.

This is correct as, legally, you are not required to have a passport to enter Britain. A conversation at the border, explaining who you are, has to suffice, as anyone can lose a passport.

We must be very wary of allowing the state to be too efficient in its dealings with us. I will happily put up with some friction in public services as a reasonable price to pay for privacy and liberty.

Tristram C Llewellyn Jones

Ramsey, Isle of Man