Moneymaker clinches licence to print passports
PrintDe La Rue secures £400m deal
Posted in Government, 12th June 2009 08:38 GMT
Free whitepaper – Total cost of ownership of Dell, HP and IBM blade solutions
De La Rue, the company which prints all British bank notes, has won a ten year contract to make biometric passports.
The £400m deal is the largest so far handed out as part of the introduction of ID cards and upgraded passports.
The new ID documents will include the ability to store fingerprints as well as other security features such as watermarks and "enhanced security features". The passport will also include what the press release describes as "a chip antenna", which we assume is an RFID chip.
The Home Office has already handed out contracts worth £385m to CSC to provide an application and enrolment system for ID card requests and IBM got £265m to create a secure database of fingerprints and facial biometrics.
De La Rue was chosen from a shortlist of 20 bidders.
The National Identity Service reckons the whole deal will cost £4.9bn over ten years.
Press release is here.
The Tories have pledged to abandon the national ID card scheme but it is likely that the central database and passports will survive. ®
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter