To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his Department has conducted (a) research studies and (b) tests in accordance with national standards on basic access control on the durability of contactless chips and cards when they are subjected to regular swiping in order to disclose information kept on the card in relation to the identity card scheme.

The Identity Cards programme has conducted a review of studies into the use and durability of contactless chips and cards suitable for use in an identity cards scheme as well as wide-ranging market sounding survey to gain the views of a cross section of suppliers in the smartcard value chain.

This survey concluded that a ten year life for a contactless card was feasible. It should be noted that swiping, to enable basic access control, is only likely to be required when the card is used as an international travel document. Indeed, more recent reader technologies use a camera to read the machine readable characters on a card or passport and therefore do not require the document to be swiped.