Smart, finally something I can disagree with Col on, if only slightly!

Firstly, I totally understand concerns about the project being outsourced to some company, messed up and costing too much.
That is inevitably going to happen and I'm not happy about that in the slightest.

And yes, the security on these cards would need to be impressive - Note to Tony, no Microsoft on this one eh Tone?

However, if they don't hold anything more than existing NI cards, licenses and birth certs then that's not much of a concern anyway as they
are only as secure as your back pocket and don't contain much that is of interest or which can't be easily found out by other dubious means.

However, I think you've answered your question on why these would be a good thing. Precisely because you could consolidate all those
cards and docs onto one card. Much more convenient and people like convenience. Can you imagine banking without a bank card these days?

Fact is, as it stands, people like Tesco etc probably have more data on you than the government does. The government don't know what
you've bought in your shopping and in which store you bought it in the last 3 years for example :)

Overall I am in favour of such things because of the potential benefits, particularly medically.
It would be great if in an accident someone could easily tell you were diabetic etc by a quick lookup. Though they could do that with a paper card with an ID number on it and a database.

I think the real benefits would not be available until the back end of the system was all sorted. NHS records out of paper and on to a database etc. All this is a long way off. The UK has been very backward on this sort of stuff and it's time we moved on from that position in my opinion.
It makes me cringe when I go into my GP and he pulls out that folder with all the notes in... I wonder how many buildings and clerks Tesco would need to store all their data in that fashion?