PLANS to set up a swipe card reader system on lampposts to encourage children to walk to school have been branded “bonkers” by a Yorkshire politician.

UKIP member Godfrey Bloom who represents the county in Brussels, has criticised suggestions in a Government White Paper that pupils could use the technology to show they made their way to lessons by foot rather than by car or bus.

Mr Bloom said: “We really are being governed by madmen and this Government is so convinced it has the right to harass people that it has lost all grasp of common sense.

“The thought of the sheer cost of this idea brings me out in hives, but that isn’t the half of it. The civil liberties implications are appalling in that the school would not just know what the children are doing there, but how they got there. It is none of their business, and if one set of data went missing, just think of the horror.”