Identity Cards Bill

If that has been done, I would be delighted if the noble Baroness could track it down and get it put in the Library of the House. I would very much like to read that. The matter of benefits is important. The fact that her colleague has been so misled on the benefits of these cards suggests that there is a great deal of misinformation around. It is not impossible that an identity card does have benefits. There is an interesting experiment being run in Bracknell by the local authority, where an ID system is being built up on the back of benefits. At the moment, though, we have not been offered any benefits with this card, as I understand it, although people have fantasised about them. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said on Second Reading that the cards would be useful for stop and search. Will we have policemen going around like Judge Dredd with fingerprint- and iris-checking equipment and something to photograph the face? No, all they will have to look at is the card, which is just the same as any other card when it comes to checking it and saying: ““Oh, that looks like him. Yes, I’ll believe you””. We need to go into the practical benefits of this system, because the acceptability of this card will depend enormously on how good those benefits are. It will also depend enormously, as my noble friend said in her speech, on what happens when things go wrong, because, with such a complex system, things will. If I find myself coming back from holiday with my young daughter and I fail my checks at the airport because something has happened with one of my fingers, or the machine is on the blink, or I am developing some disease that means I am full of water and everything is out of size, what happens to me? Will I then be made to wait in the airport for two weeks while they identify me, or will I get sent back to Tenerife? How are we to deal with the many occasions when the identity checks will fail? That is crucial in the acceptance of the system and we need a much clearer statement from the Government on the practical problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, will learn, this House is about dealing with the practical problems—whether this system will actually work—and we need much more data and understanding than we have been getting from the Government.