In the dinner queue at Ranelagh Church of England comprehensive school, Bracknell, tomorrow's citizens are already well used to ID cards.
At the till, children pay for their food with smart cards charged with cash credits. The system allows a maximum spend of £5 a day; parents know the money is being spent on food rather than other temptations. Children who get free school meals go through exactly the same process, avoiding any stigma.
The same smart card, called Edge, issued by Bracknell Forest borough council, registers each child's attendance at school. It also identifies them at public libraries.
Bracknell Forest sees schoolchildren and library users as the vanguard of its ambition for each one of the Thames Valley's 110,000 residents to hold an Edge card. So far, it has issued nearly 18,000, in a project costing £5.6 million. The council claims that Edge is the most advanced multi-function smart card in the UK. How the card will fit in with the national scheme, however, remains uncertain.
Bracknell Forest began to consider smart cards in 1998. The idea came from the leader of an incoming Conservative administration, Paul Bettison, who was taking a lot of flak for cutting a bus pass scheme.
"People were saying: 'It's the only thing the council has ever done for me, and you're taking it away'. I thought we ought to be giving something back," he says. Bettison's original idea was a loyalty card giving local discounts at the council's swimming pools and leisure centres.
After spending two years investigating multi-function technology, the council went ahead with a pilot. Originally, the card was to have seven functions: school meals, school registration, the Connexions youth reward scheme, youth club membership, library membership, car parking and an all-purpose "e-purse".
Six of these are going ahead. Parking was dropped because of the cost of fitting hardware at every car park. "Retro-fitting really wasn't worth it," says Vincent Paliczka, the council's director of leisure services.
The pilot showed that the technology worked. For the next phase, the council issued a 16k card with a dual interface, contact and contactless (which works by simply laying the card on a pad).
Each card has two e-purses: a closed purse which works only in schools and an open purse for other council services. The council set an arbitrary limit of £50 on the open purse, though in theory it could carry any sum.
All 13,000 members of the council's public libraries have received Edge cards in replacement for their membership cards. Not everyone was happy: a handful of people resisted having their photographs on the new cards. The compromise was to photograph the bar code on their old cardboard library card.
For holders under the age of 21, the card carries a date of birth. (Twenty one was chosen to allow Edge to work as a proof of age card for young-looking 18 to 21-year-olds.)
The next big leap will be to integrate the card in more sensitive council services. Home helps, for example, could carry hand-held card readers to create an electronic record of their visits from their clients' cards. Another plan is to issue a card compatible with London's Oyster transport card.
Bettison bubbles with ideas for the card as a behaviour-influencing instrument, starting with rewards for children who choose healthy lunches. He also sees no reason why the card has to be carried in a wallet. "Why not a council SIM card for mobile phones? We'd have the ability to know where the citizen is, as well as who they are."
Card security, so far, has been elementary. Children receive a card when they enroll at a school; adults by presenting two forms of identification at a library. Each card holder has a 16-digit unique number (issued to the council in a block by Apacs, the organisation that issues credit card numbers). For more sensitive applications, the council is considering biometrics.
However, much will depend on national decisions about multi-purpose cards. Bracknell Forest is trying to influence this work (and to ensure that it does not end up developing the Macintosh of smart cards while everyone else settles on Windows) by leading two projects funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. One is a collaboration between authorities in the Thames Valley, the other is coordinating work across England.
The big question is how these schemes will fit with the national scheme.
Phil Hope, minister for local e-government at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, cheerfully admitted this week that no one yet knows. "I think we will be looking at lots of different technologies. Some of Bracknell Forest's experience may well have lessons for the national project."
Whatever happens, Bettison says he has no regrets about taking the risk - despite receiving some political scars. "It's been a wonderful target for the opposition, who can always say 'shouldn't you be spending the money on social services?'.
"But I bet they would have said the same thing about the electric light," says Bettison. "The real question is, how much would it cost us not to do it?"
