First they came for the immigrants ....

Given the other article on El Reg at the moment regarding ICO's Audit of HBoS, there are some concerns here.

This article about the EU Biometric Database states that each country's relevant data protection agency will regulate access to this database and monitor it for misuse. But it is obvious that the ICO have zero power as outlined in the HBoS article. Even if the database was abused, ICO have no power to do anything except tell the responsible parties off. Which is hardly going to deter any future abuse of this system.