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Blunkett lands job with an ID cards company
Last updated at 19:37pm on 25.03.07
David Blunkett has taken a job with an ID cards company
David Blunkett, the architect of the controversial identity card scheme, has landed a job with a U.S. firm which bids for ID contracts.
The former home secretary is working for Entrust, which provides the software for the company running Spain's national identity card system.
His job is to advise on "government relations" but Entrust insists he will not be lobbying the Home Office once the bidding process for ID cards begins here.
Mr Blunkett, now a backbench Labour MP, took up his job as chairman of Entrust's international advisory committee on March 1 after clearing his appointment with the Parliamentary advisory committee on business appointments.
The committee gave its approval on condition Mr Blunkett did not lobby ministers on Entrust's behalf for two years from the date he left government.
This would leave him free to do so from November this year, although Entrust said his job would never involve lobbying the British Government.
A spokesman for the firm, which has an office in Reading, said the committee the 59-year-old MP chairs helped with strategy on government relations. But he declined to say whether the firm intended to bid for ID card contracts in the UK.
The anti-ID card pressure group NO2ID described Mr Blunkett's job as "distasteful", warning he might "recycle" his ID card ideas in other EU countries.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "We can't have a situation where a high-profile former minister, particularly one who was so involved in the ID card scheme, is employed by a company looking for lucrative Government contracts."
Mr Blunkett's last company directorship, with DNA Bioscience, led to his resignation from his post as work and pensions minister in November 2005 after it emerged he failed to clear the job with the advisory committee on business appointments.
Reader views (3)
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Does anyone else remember the Labour Party's promises on 'no more sleaze', no more 'jobs for the boys', that there would be no more 'whiffs of cronyism' to the the UK government? Well, I have said all along that there are only two reasons that this government has pushed ID cards. Firstly, because George W told them to - it afterall the USA that has insisited on having biometric passports not the rest of the world and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, so that Mr Blair's friends in the IT industry have another lucrative goverment database project to role out for the next ten years once they've finished botching the current NHS, DWP and home office ones. We don't need ID cards, we need proper policing and detection, we don't need biometric passports, we need people in the home office who do their job properly, not issuing multiple passports to known terrorists, and frankly, if the current lot are in charge of issuing these ID cards then heaven help us!
- Andy Whalley, Hastings, East Sussex
Quote: "Entrust insists he will not be lobbying the Home Office once the bidding process for ID cards begins here."
This means several things including:
1. Blunkett will be doing his lobbying now.
2. Entrust believe that lobbying does not include Blunkett talking to old work-mates about work they are involved with once bidding process starts - not specific lobbying - just fact finding e.g. who's bidding etc.
- Garry Anderson, Haverhill UK
So presumably we can expect Spain to start having real problems with it's ID card system any day now.
- Trevor Roll, London
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