A PASSPORT centre serving East Lancashire is to open this year.

The base in St John's Court, Ainsworth Street, Blackburn, will create five part-time jobs.

For the first two years it will just handle new passports, with applicants having to undergo new interviews in a bid to cut fraud.

But from 2009 the centre will also issue replacement passports - and applicants will have to provide their fingerprints.

It is estimated that the centre will deal with 13,000 cases a year.

Blackburn has been chosen as it was judged to be a convenient base for people from across East Lancashire.

Some 69 such centres are being opened across the country, but the scheme has proved controversial.

UK Independence Party North West MEP John Whittaker said the scheme was an infringement of freedom, privacy and dignity and would see the creation of a massive database of personal information and fingerprints.

Dr Whittaker said the interviewer would demand details of official numbers, addresses for the last few years and educational institutions.

He said: "The information will be used to look up everything that can be found out about you on all the government and private sector databases: school records, social services, police, credit checking, family details."

However Home Office chiefs said the 10 to 20 minute interviews for new applicants would help cut fraud.

The Home Office could not give a precise date when Blackburn's office would start to operate, but a rolling programme opening the centres across the country starts next month and ends in December.

Ministers hope the network will mean that half the population are within 15 minutes of a centre, and 99 per cent within an hour.

Manchester and Liverpool will also have interview centres.

Last year the Identity and Passport Service detected 1,700 frauds, 74 per cent from first-time applicants.

A Home Office spokesman said: "Identity fraud is one of Britain's fastest-growing crimes, we believe there is a need for an improved system of identity authentication.

"The interview will provide a powerful weapon in the fight against passport fraud."