Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, as someone old enough to have grown up in the company of what seemed a useful and quite friendly wartime identity card, I had not until now worried too much about the Bill. At the various stages of discussion of the Government’s plans, I thought, ““Oh well, this is inevitable”” and did not even worry too much when my party changed its point of view on the subject. Now, however, having read this Bill—particularly the part relating to the register—I am deeply anxious. If more of the 70 per cent of people who, the Minister told us, are happy about the Bill read and understood the section about the register, they too would be anxious. I want to speak, perhaps rather more innocently than speakers to date who have been great experts on the subject, about how I suspect the public will feel about the system as it develops. The trouble, as so often, is that we have had an over-use of spin. The Government, having been persuaded that modern living and protecting our shores requires a Bill such as this, have produced a draconian set of proposals, doing so with the soothing, reassuring spin at which many of them are so expert. There is not much new here, we are told. Our names are already on sorts of computers in the public and private sectors. We do not mind registering births, deaths and marriages. This will simply be an extension of that sort of system. We have heard a lot about how almost all the European countries have such a system. We do not know whether they have measures like the register, but we are told that they have cards. In any case, it will begin as a voluntary affair. It is only an enabling Bill, a small step in modernisation; we have heard all that. The Quakers have a motto: ““Tell power the truth””. During the Bill’s passage through another place, honourable Members—including, to their enormous credit, many on the Government Benches—tried to tell the Government the truth about the Bill, but the Government succeeded, just, in whipping the Bill through. Now the responsibility passes to noble Lords. I just hope that those on the Benches opposite—those who are with us now and those who will be thinking about the Bill—will have that courage, if they feel as I do and as their colleagues did in another place. The truth that the Government must be told is that the Bill as it stands is not a small step, as they claim, but a huge one, which, if taken at all, must be taken with enormous care and many safeguards, which are not in the Bill at the moment. People will be very surprised when their fingerprints are taken and their eye characteristics are photographed. They will not be surprised at an ordinary photograph of their face; they are used to that. They will be surprised when they find that they are all going on to a central computer to which many people will have access, and that that record on the computer belongs to the government of the day, whatever sort of government they are. They will be surprised when everyone is obliged by law to keep that information up to date, and, if they forget to do so, there are heavy penalties to be paid. They will be very surprised when it turns out that some will be asked to give information about other people for the purposes of the register. They will be surprised that the Government will be able to change the personal details that will be required and that that can be done without all that much discussion in Parliament. They will be pretty surprised when they find that, eventually, they absolutely have to buy an identity card, particularly if they do not have a passport. And they will be surprised when they have to produce that card. They may not have to carry it—we are told that they will not have to—but they will have to produce it as you do a driving licence and that may happen quite often. I think that they will be surprised when they discover that the identity card does not belong to them although they bought it. It will belong to the Secretary of State and the government of the day and will go on belonging to that government, whatever sort of government they are. People are going to see this as a huge step. It is of a completely different order from going along and registering births, deaths and marriages. Incidentally, when the Government tried to put births, deaths and marriages on computer, they tried to do so not by going through all the stages in Parliament but by a regulatory reform order. The two committees in another place and in this House that are responsible for scrutinising those orders came to the conclusion that even the computerisation of births, deaths and marriages was not a simple matter. They sent those orders back to the Government, and the Government are presumably now wondering what to do about it. We all know how unsettling and even threatening it can feel if a computer makes a mistake and it is claimed that we do not exist or that we have given wrong or insufficient information. Computers do make mistakes, and government computers seem to make rather a lot of them. Imagine thousands of people—hundreds of thousands of people—whose honesty is questioned or whose benefit or hospital place is questioned because a Secretary of State is apparently doubtful whether they exist at all or are being truthful. That is how it will be seen. It happens now, and it will be even more threatening when it happens under this system. We shall wonder whether it is true that we are a country where one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. It is not surprising that the Scots Parliament and the Welsh Assembly have decided for the moment that they do not want to use identity cards as the means of admission to the services for which they are responsible. The Scots Parliament has accepted that it is a devolved matter, but it affects its services and it does not want identity cards to be used for those services. Whether that will continue to be Scottish opinion remains to be seen, but I do not think that it is at all surprising. I know that my noble friend Lord Northesk will have more to say about that. There is plenty of detail to be examined in the Bill, but there is one major change that I feel we must make in this House—it was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Holme. His committee, the Select Committee on the Constitution, has suggested that the register, the identity cards and the operation of the system should be taken out of the Government’s hands entirely and given to an independent body—an independent registrar or whatever. That would do an enormous amount to comfort the public about the rather threatening nature of what they are going to discover they have to do under the Bill. I do not think that it will do the whole trick, but it would certainly help. The Government and Parliament would still control what the system was, but the operation of that system—the voice of the computer and the querying of one’s integrity or one’s very existence—will be the voice of an independent registrar. If the Government cannot see and agree to that, I hope that Parliament as a whole will insist. I hope that this House and another place will be very strong on the issue. The Quakers are right: in this matter Parliament must tell power the truth, and the truth is very worrying.