Drivers who are pulled over by police are to have their fingerprints scanned by the side of the road. A pilot scheme for a new hand-held electronic fingerprint reader has been launched in Luton in Bedfordshire, by officers targeting motoring offences.

Police hope the Lantern device will save time and money by allowing them to identify suspects on the roadside without having to take them to the station. It allows officers to search a national database of more than six million fingerprints and get a result within five minutes. Possible savings of £2million a year are predicted with the system.

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the system because the law prevents officers from forcing people to give prints on the street.

"This trial represents an important step forward in our commitment to ensuring we have an effective and efficient police service fully equipped for the challenges of modern policing," says Police Minister Tony McNulty. "The new technology will speed up the time it takes for police to identify individuals at the roadside, enabling them to spend more time on the frontline and reducing any inconvenience for innocent members of the public."

Luigi Guerriero, from Bedfordshire Police, said: "It is definitely not Big Brother. It is directed at people deliberately trying to evade detection. Primarily, it is keeping officers on the streets. In normal circumstances it would have taken four or five hours to deal with them. We used it earlier this week when a man stopped in Leeds was found to be wanted in Leeds for other offences.

"The Big Brother issue is this; if you're not a person involved with the police you have nothing to worry about."

Other forces taking part in the pilot are British Transport Police, Essex, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, Metropolitan Police, North Wales, Northamptonshire, West Midlands and West Yorkshire.

Source:-carkeys.co.uk

If it looks like Big Brother, it acts like Big Brother it could well be Big Brother.

What a way to get everyones prints on file. Civil libertarians will have a field day with this pla surely.

Well, to be honest, I think a lot of law abiding motorists won`t object too much. The problem we have in the U.K, and maybe it`s the same the world over, is that we have far too many drivers who aren`t insured and/or taxed.

That means the rest of us are having to pay for their criminality. The police now have machines which can feed a number plate back to a central computer which will almost instantly tell the police whether a car is insured and taxed. If it means more drivers getting prosecuted for evasion then I`m certainly happy about it.

The question is though will it in time be abused by the police? Who knows.