Passport interviews 'next step to ID cards'

FACE-to-face interviews with passport applicants will help to fight fraud, officials insisted last night amid claims that the checks posed a "major threat" to individual security.

Anyone requesting a passport for the first time will be interrogated on personal details under new rules coming into effect from April.

Critics claim that the policy is over the top and a back-door means to gather data for use with the government's controversial identity card scheme.

But the head of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) said the system was a necessary "inconvenience" that would stop criminals stealing people's identities.

The Home Office said it would provide a "powerful weapon in the fight against passport fraud".

IPS chief executive James Hall said: "We all, as citizens, recognise that we have to be inconvenienced by airport security, but it's in our collective benefit that we are. So I think people will recognise that it's appropriate once in their lifetime to go through a little bit more inconvenience in order that we can ensure the integrity of the passport document."

The questions were "not particularly intrusive", he said, but had to be details no one but a genuine applicant was likely to know. "We might ask the applicant if they had a mortgage and, if so, with which company."

Although only a small number of fraudsters attempt to con the system, "we need to do everything we can to cut those off at source," he added.

All new applicants, some 600,000 a year, will face the procedure, and from 2009 it will be extended to those renewing lost, stolen or expired passports.

Campaign group NO2ID dismissed Hall's claims as "tripe". National co-ordinator Phil Booth said: "The IPS's own publications, even its own name, make it completely clear that it is a pretext to build the ID scheme. The only reason your private life is to be raked over by officials in this way is to collect and connect all official information about you for the National Identity Register. The spin is intended to be reassuring, but the real message is clear: if you want to travel, you are a suspect."

Liberal Democrat spokesman Simon Hughes said: "Most people do not have the time or the inclination to have to travel, probably quite a long way from where they live, probably during the working week when they have jobs to do, to be able to keep the Home Office happy. The Home Office needs to calm down, back off and let people go about their lives."

A Home Office spokesman said all data not required for the application form would be destroyed "shortly after the interview". The UK is one of the few western countries that currently does not require applicants to be seen in person, he said.