Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, as the first speaker from these Benches since the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Soley, perhaps I may add my congratulations to him on a very refreshing and thoughtful speech. Those of us who have known and admired his work over the years were not at all surprised by that. I hope that we shall hear from him often. Most of the contributions to this debate have been and will be about the merits and/or disadvantages of an identity card scheme. However, I want to confine myself much more closely than that. I want simply to speak about the potential constitutional implications of such a scheme and the appropriate safeguards that we might wish to put in place against its abuse. That will allow me to be relatively brief. I have no doubt that the Constitution Committee, of which I have the honour to serve as chairman, has among its members both supporters and opponents of the notion of ID cards, but for the life of me I could not tell the House which are which because that has not been the subject of our discussions. Whatever our individual point of view, all of us were agreed—on a cross-party and no-party basis—that this Bill fundamentally adjusts the relationship between the citizen and the state. How could it be otherwise when it will put the state in possession of an unprecedented, consolidated file of information about every individual which it did not have before? However, the Government do not agree. In her generous letter sent to myself and to other members of the committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, dismissed the notion that the Bill could be considered as constitutionally significant for the reason we gave. The burden of her response was that the scheme should be treated as an administrative change not dissimilar in kind from other data collection schemes the Government have put in hand from time to time. On the face of it, that is a straightforward disagreement, but I invite noble Lords to consider, in an instance like this, whose judgment should be trusted. I yield to no one in my admiration for the noble Baroness. She is always extremely persuasive and convincing. I mention the Home Office with some hesitation when following a very distinguished former Home Secretary in this debate. Here is a great department of state with many qualities, but I doubt whether any noble Lords, looking back over the years, would think of the Home Office primarily as a bastion of the defence of human rights and individual liberties. Possibly there might have been a brief, golden exception during the period of tenure of the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, but despite the qualities of the Home Office that is not the first thing we think of. On the other hand, your Lordships set up a Select Committee on the Constitution to function expressly as a watchdog, and now we have barked. What is more, we seem to be barking in the same key as the Information Commissioner and the Law Society. Our concerns centre far more on the notion of the register than on whether individuals are required to hold an identity card. I invite the noble Baroness to take on board legitimate concerns about the concentration of extensive personal information in the hands of the Government, particularly in an age when that is made more potent by the advances in technology and data storage, which allows data to be mined and cross-referenced with ease and which lends itself to fishing expeditions of one kind or another. We must be very careful that we do not reach a point where the citizen and his or her life are at the disposal of the state rather than the other way round. Let me quote briefly from our report, which I know many of your Lordships have read. It states:"““we nonetheless continue to believe that it is important to ensure, irrespective of the Bill’s merits or the benefits claimed for it (issues which are beyond our remit), that the scheme is conducted upon a strong legal basis and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect individuals from excessive intrusion into their affairs by institutions of State, or indeed by others—in other words, to ‘future proof’ it against the potential for abuse of the registration scheme by officials of the State claiming to act in the public interest””." The Constitution Committee therefore concluded that if this measure does command the support of Parliament—for security, crime or other reasons that have been given—three safeguards are essential. First—other noble Lords have referred to this—there should be no question of the legislation in the Bill authorising a seamless transition from an essentially voluntary partial trial to universal compulsory application without reverting to Parliament with new primary legislation. In her introductory remarks, the Minister invited us to consider the principle of compulsion now. With respect, we are considering compulsion now. That cannot be good parliamentary practice in general, but it is particularly inappropriate for a measure of this kind, with implications for every citizen. The second safeguard is that a body independent of the Government should be the custodian of the national identity register, with proper safeguards to prevent improper access to data, whether by public servants or by others. Finally, we have suggested that the proposed National Identity Scheme Commissioner should be clearly independent of the Government, with the power to investigate complaints and a duty to report directly to Parliament. Your Lordships will take differing views on this legislation—as is already apparent—but I invite you to consider these proposed safeguards. I hope that they will be helpful to our deliberations today and at later stages of the Bill.