A quick question: have you used your National Insurance Number (NINO) lately?
Follow-up question: if we discount using it for taking up a new job or submitting your tax return*, when was the last time you used it, and what for?
Reason I ask: the minister responsible for the ID Card Scheme, Meg Hillier, has - both times I've heard her speak recently - cited this as a use-case in support of the ID Card: that NI numbers are needed so frequently that any citizen would be happy to have them encapsulated in a robust credential. That certainly doesn't reflect my own personal NINO usage, but it could be that I'm un-representative.
It seems that citizens' National Insurance Numbers will be among the data items held on the card itself (as opposed to held in the National Identity Register but not on the card)... unless I'm misunderstanding her, which is quite possible. I got the opportunity, on Wednesday, to make that point to her in person at one of the consultation workshops currently being run by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS).
What I suggested was this: if you take the recurrent questions of "What is it for?", "What data is held?", "Who has access?", and "Is it compulsory?", the answers are critically and substantially different depending on whether one is talking about the ID Card, the biometric passport, or the National Identity Register (NIR). Unfortunately in almost all policy-level statements these three things - and particularly the ID Card and the NIR - are talked about as if they were indistinguishable (and I'm afraid Wednesday was no exception).
Having said all that, the Home Secretary's recent publication of the implementation plan may signal some real changes in approach. Of course, as the BBC's Nick Robinson astutely points out here, all that does politically is divide opinion between those who take the implementation plan as a sign that there's a real move away from the all-encompassing system catered for by the primary legislation, and those who think that there's no real change in the government's aims for the National Identity Scheme as a whole, just a rather less bulldozering plan for putting it into effect...
And there's the dilemma. If this is perceived as just a more subtle attempt to introduce a panoptical and intrusive system which can track the use of any designated credential, then opponents are unlikely to be appeased. On the other proverbial prong of the cleft stick; if Ms Smith and Ms Hillier really have an appetite for scaling back on the aims of the Scheme as a whole, it opens up a gap between what the enacted legislation allows for and what they intend to put into practice. Opponents will still be unappeased, because they will want to know what the point is of keeping draconian legislation on the statute books if you don't intend to put it into practice.
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One of the things I like about my NI Number is that I only ever use it for "Tax" related things. Which is is completely unlike my US Social Security Number which gets abused so much, despite most of the uses actually being illegal, it might as well be stamped on your head and posted on your blog and twittered everyday.
I have had one single case I remember being asked for my UK NI number other than by an employer or HMRC, and that was as an option for a Thwate personal email certificate. I kind of doubt that was the use case Hiller had in mind (guess what Safari spell check wants to correct that surname too!, hmn).
Posted by Darren Moffat on May 09, 2008 at 09:46 PM GMT+00:00 #
It occurs to me that benefit claimants are asked for their NINO a lot. There's no particular reason for that, since almost no benefits these days are reliant on NIC records but the state organs continue to do it whenever they can.
Since MPs do a lot of constituency work with serial claimants who are floundering around in the lower reaches of the system, they may assume that this redundant bureaucratic practice is (a) necessary and important, and (b) a feature of all "ordinary people's" lives.
Posted by Guy Herbert on May 10, 2008 at 06:34 AM GMT+00:00 #