According to a report on BBC News website this evening:

Biometric ID cards will include fingerprints, plus eye or facial scans. Proposals to fingerprint children aged 11 to 15 as part of new passport and ID card plans are being considered.
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Under existing plans every passport applicant over 16 will have details – including fingerprints – added to a National Identity register from 2008. But there was concern youngsters could use passports without biometric details up to the age of 20 … This could happen if they are issued a child passport between the ages of 11 and 15, which would be valid for five years.

The challenge that officials have been asked to find an answer to, is how do you make sure that people who are 16 and over have got biometric details recorded in their passports.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said the proposal “borders on the sinister” and added it showed the government was trying to end the presumption of innocence. “This government is clearly determined to enforce major changes in the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way never seen before.”
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Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said “It is a measure of ministerial arrogance that plans are being laid to fingerprint children as young as 11 without having a public debate first.
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Campaigners have long battled fingerprinting of children in schools, a practice they estimate happens in about 3,500 establishments. From this month guidelines from privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner will urge schools to get parental consent before taking biometric data. But under the Data Protection Act schools do not have to seek parental consent, and calls to outlaw the controversial practice have been rejected by the government.

I can choose not to have a passport (for instance) and thus not have my biometric data recorded. A child under 16 cannot by make such a decision as, by law, they are a minor and thus they cannot give their consent. Surely no-one should be fingerprinted, or have any other biometric (including DNA) information taken without their explicit consent.

Yet again this government seems to be ignoring both existing, long-established, English law and our civil liberties on the spurious premise that it will help in the “war against terrorism”. We need to resist this at every turn.