The government appears set to introduce a system of ID cards within two years, it has been claimed.
Government sources say the increased threat of a terror attack in the wake of the Madrid bombings and the recent terror arrests in London have underlined the need for ID cards.
They claim Tony Blair has been persuaded that the cards should be introduced more quickly than had been initially planned.
But some senior ministers, including Patricia Hewitt and John Prescott, are still said to be opposing ID cards.
They believe the system will be expensive and ineffective - and have raised fears about a civil liberties backlash.
Senior police chiefs, however, have warned that ID cards would be a powerful tool to combat asylum abuse and target terrorists.
Interviewed on Sunday, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens said that he wanted to see ID cards introduced as soon as possible.
Sir John said that he was pressing for ID cards “as soon as we can get a bill through parliament".
"The borders of this country have been porous and we can prove that with a number of cases which have had high profile recently," said the Met chief.
"I think that the drive towards ensuring that immigration, customs and the police are working together and on occasions working together with some of the excellent work done by MI5 in particular and MI6 is the way forward.
"You’ve got to have some border controls which are there, which are obvious and which work.”
He said the case for ID cards was now unarguable.
“It is a problem. I think it is a recognised problem. This is why I think identification cards would be of great assistance," he told GMTV.
"Up to a year and a half ago I would have been against identification cards because we had no certainty that the documentation used for Identification Cards could actually prove with certainty the identification of someone.
“Biometrics, the use of eyes, the use of fingerprints is now a certainty in a way that never was before so therefore identification either whether it be on border controls or whether we have to deal with stop and search in the street, anti terrorism kind of activity or even along the normal way that police officers work would give a certainty we need."
Told that Patricia Hewitt had claimed that compulsory ID cards were “many, many years away”, Sir John added: “Well, I disagree with her totally. I think the sooner they’re brought in the better and as a professional police officer I have to tell you we need them.”
