Britons face 11 ID checks a year

Passports are commonly used to prove identity

UK adults are asked to prove their identity (ID) 11 times on average each year, research from Manchester Business School has found. Laws meant to combat money-laundering and terrorism mean Britons are increasingly being asked to produce ID.

Buying an airline ticket, leasing a property, opening a savings account and registering with a doctor require ID.

And according to the research, by 2010 Britons will be asked to produce ID an average of 17 times a year.

Consumer burden

Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business Rob Laurence, GB Group

Technology firm GB Group, which commissioned Manchester Business School to undertake the research, said UK firms and government agencies were making up to half a billion identity checks on customers each year.

This could place a great burden on individual consumers who had to produce passports or driving licences to prove who they were, the group said.

For example, those moving house may have their identity checked more than five times throughout the process by different organisations such as estate agents, solicitors, financial advisers, lenders and the Land Registry.

“Most [consumers] are frustrated to be asked to produce documents such as passports and driving licences, often a number of times by different departments of the same business,” Rob Laurence, GB Group spokesman, said. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5193986.stm 

A vigilant BLOGDIAL lurker points us to this flagrant piece of PR being hosted free of charge at the BBQ (free of charge apart from the fistful of fivers it took to get it published.)

This story has no author. That is the most telling thing about it. It is a pure regurgitation of a press release from GB Group, who used the cover of Manchester Business School to produce this thinly veiled call for an ID Card to ‘make peoples lives easier’. You will note that there is no link to N02ID in the ‘related links’ sidebar.

The BBC should always be forced to divulge how these ‘stories’ or ‘pieces’ have come to be published in a ‘story audit trail’ so that we can see who the biased writers are, and identify the PR companies that have priveledged access to the BBC.

In fact, if they won’t do it, we can do it ourselvs in a Web 2.0 mashup style, where people can report PR injected BBC URLS in a database, so that we can correlate the authors, businesses and PR firms who are squirting stories into BBQ. Hmmm, “Will someone do it” is the question we ask aloud.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 11:50 am and is filed under BBQ, Politricks.