Tories on the attack over IT projects

The Conservative party warned today that it would scrap a number of large citizen databases and "revoke the powers" of the state to spy "excessively" on citizens, if it won the next general election

It said it would scrap the identity cards programme, the DNA database, and the ContactPoint database of all children

David Cameron, party leader, told an audience at Imperial College: "Today we're in a control state. There are one million citizens on DNA database. Soon we'll be forced to surrender fingerprints to identity cards

Britain had become a "control state", he said, in which citizens were being excessively watched walking down the street, and councils were using legislation to monitor resident's behaviour even in their own homes

His speech follows on from continued warnings by the Conservative party that it would scrap the identity cards programme

Concern over government IT programmes is likely to be a battleground in a general election, due to take place by summer next year.

Cameron criticised the government for wanting to put "the most complex, important, personal information there is" about children onto the ContactPoint database

Of the DNA database, which holds the data of around five million people, including a million who have never been convicted of a crime, he said it was "a situation that would cause concern under the most oppressive regimes in the world, but it's happening right here, right now in Britain".

"For those who don't get [an ID card]", he said, "there is talk of fines, enforced registration and penalties in public service provision," he said.

Cameron made no mention of the NHS National Programme for IT, under which the health records of all citizens in the country will be accessible on a central network. But in April he made it clear the Conservatives would scrap that part of the programme, which will be at least four years late

While promising to remove private citizen data from government databases, Cameron also pledged to improve the public data available to individual citizens.

This would increase access to information such as how well public services perform and what salaries civil servants earn, he said

"If we are serious about helping people exert more power over the state, we need to give them the information to do it," he said.