A minister at the Home Office disclosed it wants people to put personal health information on the cards to give doctors information for emergencies.

Card-holders will be urged to volunteer details of blood group, allergies, and whether they wish to donate organs. Ministers stressed there would be no compulsion.

Andy Burnham, a junior Home Office minister with responsibility for promoting ID cards, said there was an “impressive benefits case” for use of the cards by the NHS.

Health information about individuals would be kept on the central identity card database, and would not be visible on the cards themselves.

Pressure groups condemned the move as “function creep”, while the British Medical Association (BMA) said it was “sceptical” of the benefits.

Last October Charles Clarke, the home secretary, explicitly ruled out the move, saying “no medical details will be on the database”.

However, Burnham denied the government was now performing a U-turn: “There is an argument to say that if people want to put personal information on the card, they should. It is something we are looking at.

“You could argue that blood group, allergies, donor status, that sort of information could be potentially helpful, for example, when a patient arrives in accident and emergency. People could also put their next of kin on the cards if they wanted.”

A clause added to identity card legislation last year states that the database will not hold sensitive personal details. However, Burnham said: “That is specifically about attaching NHS records to the database. We have explicitly ruled this out and have not changed our position. What we are talking about is simple, voluntary health information.”

Asked if HIV-Aids victims would be encouraged to disclose their status, he said: “We are not considering that at this stage.”

The Home Office also wants to use the cards to tackle so-called health tourism — with GP surgeries and hospitals encouraged to use the system to check whether foreign patients are entitled to NHS care.

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