NO2ID

I must confess, I've also puzzled over the 2011 date too.

Two thoughts occur to me...

Just maybe the date, or rather the period of 5 years, is a legal thing for 'temporary changes of use'. Perhaps something greater than 5 years would disqualify it as a 'temporary' change? I don't know, I'm just guessing here.

The second thought concerns compulsion. Lets assume that the period late 2007 to 2011 is the softening up stage. Slowing but surely various agencies begin to make life difficult for you without an ID Card. You know the thing; "sorry but you cannot collect your pension without an ID Card", or "From next month bus passes will only be issued to those with an ID Card" etc etc etc.

Of course over the initial period you'll have the relative luxury of attending one of the 69 odd local centres. Now lets say that towards 2011 the Government are hoping to have 'persuaded' enough saps - sorry, members of the public - to have signed up for an ID Cards that its politically safe for them to move to compulsion. With me so far? Okay here's the clever part... they could also take the view that the lagards and feckless only have themselves to blame for dragging their feet and so its not unreasonable to make them attend one of the main processing centres - likely to be the existing passport offices. And therefore, according to the secret Government projections (or just my imagination), there would be no need for the local centres currently applying for temporary planning permission???

My guess is that they will probably be building purpose built places after that or more likely just before so they all come on line when compulsion is introduced. Maybe they have a room 101 built into them, it's rather horrifying to even contemplate what they figure things will be like 5 years from now.

Since first posting about the Ipswich office I've been in to the Town Hall to see the plans. As well as all the usual forms and maps I was surprised to find a proposed layout. That document is on the Ipswich Council website - either I missed it when I first looked or they were still in the process of scanning the drawings. (Note that their system is a bit strange - I've had times when it couldn't even find the application and other times when it reported that there weren't any documents associated with it.)

The proposed layout shows several features that pretty much confirm that it's the interview office. There are two areas labelled as "Biometric Room" and there is a box labelled ""Security Cabinet by UKPS" (I assume this is to secure the communication link). There is also a server room (is it good security practice to locate something like this against an exterior wall?) and three interview spaces, two of 6sqm, and one of 7.5sqm which is evidently to give wheelchair access.


For anyone living in Ipswich (or east Suffolk?) who wants to, comments on the application have to be in by 23rd October.

Representations should go to:

Ipswich Planning Services
Grafton House
15-17 Russell Road
Ipswich
IP1 2DE

The planning application is 06/00853/FUL

The actual plans can be viewed at the Town Hall.

I assume if they get some comments it will go to a planning meeting and not just be "nodded through" by the officers of the council. That meeting could be interesting because the town is run by the Conservatives with the support of the local Liberal Democrats. It would also be a good opportunity for the kind of small, modest protest that doesn't look so bad for not having half a million people marching around. I'd be into holding a banner or giving leaflets to the councillors and staff entering the building if anyone wants to join me.

Come on Ipswich - We've got to start somewhere.

Let's arrange what,where and when.

We'll show 'em!!!!!

Each council planning meeting allows one person to speak against the application and one person for it and I think this is on a first come first served basis. We need to think up some excellent arguments and get to be that person. If you really want to fight them then being the speaker will give you the opportunity to make a full presentation to all the councillors there before they vote.

The presentation I saw on a TETRA mast application was maybe 15 minutes long and you can include a slide show or overhead projector stuff to make it look really smart. Naturally there will be a government person there doing the same but I figure that anyone who runs a regional NO2ID group would be well equipped to do that sort of thing and if nothing else it will help raise the profile of the local group. The press will likely be there as well and you can phone them up to guarantee their presence, indeed this would be perfect as they love an invitation and something controversial will make for popular reading. An opportunity not to be missed.

Oh and also just to say the one I went to was preceded by a small local campaign in local shops asking people to write in. There were a over two hundred letters of objection of which I think 70 or so were original letters and the rest a signed standard protest letter. The industry man was totally incompetent and didn't have his heart in it and he was stumbling. The council were overwhelmed by the number of people who turned up, as normally they appear to be talking amongst themselves, so they were feeling like celebs with their audience bulging out of the door. I remember a real gaff by the industry man along the lines of when asked what happens when the trees grow he replied they would be under contract to chop the tops off to ensure they don't interfere with the mast. I think it was this little detail that really put their backs up and the result. Nine against, one abstention and zero for the plan. In practice it’s got more to do with the more human aspects than purely technical arguments, councillors have their particular quirks.

Is this something NO2ID would be prpeared to co-ordinate? Could they, for example have the leaflets printed? If you guys did this, I would certainly help distribute said leaflets. I feel it would look much better if NO2iD could co-ordinate it.

On a different note, does anyone happen to know who the local councillors and MP is/are for the area where this registration is proposed to be built?

If there are now as many planning applications in the pipeline as there are to built these wretched registration centres, it seems to me that NO2ID ought to adopt immediately as one of it's campaigning strategies, policies designed to frustrate and delay these applications as long as possible. Throwing as many spanners in the works as possible and doing everything we can pratically speaking to f**k it all up is likely to yield significant results.

Anyone reading this from Ipswich or Bury St Edmunds who's prepared to help campaign against the local processing centres, please PM me via this forum, or text/phone me on the number below. Ipswich and Bury are reasonably close to Cambridge, so our local group here may be able to offer some help.

The first order of business is clearly to get in a planning objection before the deadline. We also need to find out when the planning hearing will be, so that we can plan a timetable.

---

Andrew Watson
NO2ID Cambridge coordinator
07710 469624

We've also sent an urgent e-mail request to all of our registered supporters* in the Ipswich area. The deadline is tight in this case, but planning objections are certainly a hugely useful tactic - and one that we're asking every NO2ID local group to pursue.

At the very least, you should be able to get press coverage out of this. Send a press release when you submit the objection to your local paper, if there's a hearing, press release that... and the result.

In the meanwhile it can't hurt for other members of your group to write letters, too. While the objection itself needs to be on valid planning grounds (e.g. lack of available parking, nuisance to neighbours, etc.) a debate on the letters pages, on stalls, etc. will allow you to rehearse the broader arguments about compulsory ID cards, including interrogation & fingerprinting for entry onto the ID database, in front of a much wider audience.

If you find yourself in a town due an interrogation centre but without an existing NO2ID local group, then now is the ideal time to start one! Send an e-mail to local.groups@no2id.net to get the ball rolling.

Phil Booth
National Coordinator, NO2ID


* this is why we try to encourage people to give us address details, or at least their postcode, when they register - not just e-mail.

Just found Blackburn in about 2 minutes flat.

Googled "Blackburn council", searched site for "planning applications", searched planning database for "Mapeley" and, Hey Presto...

Reference: 10/06/1042
Deadline for appeal: 1/11/06
Location: Part ground floor, St Johns Court, Ainsworth Street, Blackburn BB1 6AP

Please could someone / several of you check out the remaining locations as possible and post the results [a URL if possible, plus at least the information I've listed above in each instance] to this thread. It would be immensely helpful while Andrew, Guy & I work on coordinating efforts in Ipswich.

Here's a list of all the towns & cities due an interrogation centre (we've found 18 so far):

Aberdeen
Dumfries
Dundee
Edinburgh
Galashiels
Glasgow
Inverness
Kilmarnock
Oban
Stirling
Wick
Blackburn
Carlisle
Kendal
Liverpool
Manchester
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Middlesbrough
Newcastle
Northallerton
Armagh
Belfast
Coleraine
Omagh
Hull
Leeds
Scarborough
Sheffield
York
Aberystwyth
Newport
Swansea
Wrexham
Birmingham
Derby
Northampton
Shrewsbury
Stoke-on-Trent
Warwick
Boston
Lincoln
Leicester
Bury St Edmunds
Chelmsford
Ipswich
Kings Lynn
Luton
Norwich
Peterborough
Barnstaple
Bournemouth
Bristol
Camborne
Cheltenham
Exeter
Plymouth
Swindon
St Austell
Yeovil
Andover
Crawley
Dover
Hastings
Maidstone
Newport IOW
Oxford
Portsmouth
Reading

I don't know to be fair – it depends what's on the servers. I know of Enterprise level organisations that have server rooms in surprisingly vulnerable places, and banks that have them in bomb proof bunkers. I know we don't how any of their systems are intended to run, but one would have hoped that access to NIR data would only be via terminal to central mainframe?

This still means they are potentially having file and print servers at the interrogation centres though? What about all the queries and non-standard interrogations, or interrogations there are problems with. You can bet that there are probably going to be Outlook personal folders stored on Microsoft boxes with all our NIR data in them. I don’t want that at all, and certainly not in this type of location thanks very much.

I've written to the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act to request the full addresses of all 69 interview centres. I got the holding reply today, and they promise a substantive response by 5 November. I will post it here when it comes.

Don't hold your breath. We've got FOIAs oustanding from the early summer with multiple holding replies. The 'promise' means nothing.

Thanks, though - and I hope you hear by the 5th.

Oban?

CRAWLEY

Planning Application NO: CR/2006/0408/COU
Date received: 22/06/2006
Location: Belgrave House, Suite 3, Second Floor, Station Way, Northgate, Crawley, RH10 1HU
Proposal: Change of use to an interview and administration centre (sui generis) for a temporary period up to 30 September 2011
Application Type: Change of use
Applicant Name: Mapeley ABI Provider Ltd
Agent: King Sturge

The forthcoming dates for planning committee meetings in Ipswich are:
25 October
15 November
6 December

They've already published the agenda for 25 October and it doesn't include the one we're all interested in (I was amazed at how many applications get decided by the officers between planning meetings, though).

The committee for the last meeeting was 4 Conservatives, 2 Liberal Democrats, and 5 New Labour. The chairman was a Liberal Democrat.

All that info comes from the council's website.

15th November looks like a good possibility.

The last meeting was held in Grafton House (the new Council offices) at 9.30am. I presume future meetings will follow the same pattern.

The planning system tends to work on precedents, which could either work for or against us depending on the first few results. If we focus on the first ones and win then the following ones would become easier as they need to be consistent. Also since all applications will be similar we can build up a body of knowledge of what objections work better than others. I’d suggest talking to some people involved in mobile mast protest groups, they seem to be the experts in planning matters and could certainly give us some tips.

We are actively furtling for the location of the Swindon site.
If anyone gets a sniff of it please post it on our forum
www.talkswindon.org
or pm me.

Thnks

NEWPORT

http://www.newport.gov.uk/stellent/grou ... 070007.pdf



SWANSEA

http://www.swansea.gov.uk/media/pdf/j/f ... -pdf_1.pdf

This looks like it:

Application No: 06/00869/COU Date Received: 19.06.06
Location: 6 - 8 Stuart Street, Luton
Development: Change of use of part 4th floor offices to an interview and administration centre for a
temporary period.
Applicant: Mapeley ABI Provider Ltd WARD: SOUTH
Agent: King Sturge 30 Warwick Street
London
W1B 5NH
(Tel: 0807 529 6607)
Officer: David Gauntlett *INITIAL STATUS: DEL

Mapeley ABI Provider Ltd must be the most obscure company ever to trade in the UK. I consulted Google and the top of the list was NO2ID!

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= ... arch&meta=

It does not appear to have a website nor anything else except mainly PDF planning applications for other interrigation centres and this.

Quote

A contract for the provision of premises and facilities management services was awarded to Mapeley AbI Provider Ltd on 7 March 2006. Premises have not yet been identified for all locations but the contract requires all premises to be made available by the end of 2006. No estimate of costs for individual sites has been made. The cost of the premises and facilities management contract will be £55 million over three years. This and other costs for the first year of operation have been included in the estimated passport unit cost of £58.32 (including all internal costs and external—for example, FCO premium) for 2006–07 published on 21 April in the IPS corporate and business plan.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 504w03.htm

So lets see if we can track down the people running this outfit and we can start to interrogate them. The first question would be "how did your company get awarded this contract when it has zero trading history?”

There is a law to do with awarding government contracts to companies to do with putting the business out under competitive tender. Did this happen? I doubt it but it might be a very worthy line of investigation because if this company has been awarded the contract illegally then we have got a leaver by which we can cause them to loose it. So lets see what we can dig up on them. My experience is that companies as obscure as this one usually have something to hide, just imagine if there was some sort of potential scandal about who runs it etc. An FOI request on the tendering process would bring up something I feel.

Oh yes and another thing about planning applications, they have to be advertised to the public and this is either in a local paper or on notices near to the proposed site to give the public an opportunity to oppose it. Has this been happening? Another possible line of approach maybe if it is not the case.

They aren't quite as anonymous as you might think! "Eyes Passim" is the key phrase here. They have been frequent 'stars' in Private Eye, though I can't recall offhand if this was in relation to 'creativity' or 'invention'.

*rummage* they were mentioned in this thread but no quotes, so here's a couple to get the drift of how some of their activities are perceived:


Take a gander over at Companies House (.gov.uk) - there's a few companies listed whose names start with "Mapeley", all with the same office address (and therefore presumably part of the same group).

Ah so it is the usual trick to set up a separate company just like VeriCool is a subsidiary of Anteon UK Limited which in itself is a subsidiary of General Dynamics, the sixth largest defence contractor in the world and listed on the NYSE.

We should take a closer look at these people.

This is what they say about themselves.

About Mapeley
Mapeley was formed in 1999 to invest in UK real estate leased to high quality tenants, initially by capitalising on the growing trend of UK government and corporate occupiers of selling property portfolios and outsourcing the management of their leasehold estates.

Mapeley’s first two major acquisitions were Abbey National’s UK occupational portfolio (2000) and the STEPS portfolio (2001) - the portfolio of the departments of the Inland Revenue, HM Customs & Excise, and Valuation Office Agency.

In 2004 Mapeley made its first direct property investment and has since then acquired properties at a cost of approximately £625 million.