Chris Grayling has pledged to axe ID cards if he becomes Home Secretary after the next election.

He is working on a programme of changes he will make in his first 100 days in office if Conservatives win. Scrapping the cards is top of the list.

The Epsom MP aims to rein in government powers that impinge on privacy and civil liberties, he told an audience at a meeting at Bourne Hall last week called by campaigning group No2ID.

The ID card system was about to collapse in chaos, Chris Grayling told the audience.

He said: “The scheme has to go. If the Conservatives win the election I will be the person wielding the axe.”

If he becomes Home Secretary he will also look at other legislation.

“I think it is right that we do know who is coming into and going from this country but I don’t want us to keep detailed information about where and when you go on holiday and how you paid for it.”

And he was concerned about a data base covering all children in England.

“I have serious misgivings about this. I am all in favour of maintaining a register of children who are perceived to be at risk and I am also in favour of data being shared so people can check if a child comes from a home with known drug addicts. But I am not in favour of keeping a record of every single child in the UK. It is overkill. It is intrusive and it opens up all sorts of other issues.”

He condemned what he called “mission creep”, the use of legislation for purposes for which it was not intended, and spoke about anti terror laws being used by local councils to investigate minor infringements of local rules.

Michael Wills, a minister in the Ministry of Justice said that technology had advanced so fast in the last few years that legislation was struggling to keep up.

Where new laws were being used inappropriately the Government would look at the problem and deal with it, he said Tom Brake, MP for Wallington and Carshalton and Lib Dem spokesman for Home Affairs, said: “The government has been frenetic over the amount of bills it has passed since 1997.

“In that time it has created 3,500 new offences one of which is causing death by nuclear explosion.I think when you create that amount of new offences then it is inevitable that people will interpret them in ways that were not intended.”