Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, that is right. Nevertheless, the claim was put forward that if there was policing—just as there was in Shanghai and in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese police—all those problems would be solved. Those of us who practise in the criminal courts treat that sort of suggestion with some reserve. It is said that the Bill will protect my identity. I think that it hands over the control of my identity to a central government database. As my noble friend Lord Holme put it, it puts my identity at the disposal of the state. It is not just the basic information that will be on the database; it will be cross-referenced by numbers to my medical records, tax records, work records and—if I have them—criminal records. The history of this country is a struggle against authoritarian regimes such as those of Napoleon and Hitler, and against collective societies for individual freedom. Knowing the history of the party represented opposite, it strikes me as strange that it should set about creating an instrument that may be manipulated in future for authoritarian reasons. Knowledge is power, and we are putting power in the hands of a government who may in future have the most malign intentions. Why do I say that? Under Clause 19, data that I have provided to the central register may be handed over without my consent, and without my knowledge, to the intelligence services—much good it will do them. It may also be handed over to the police, the tax authorities—that could be a little more interesting—the VAT authorities and any designated government department. I simply will not know if the information collected about my private life has been handed over to all those government departments to use as they will. Clause 14 is about the provision by the Secretary of State of registrable facts for verification with consent, so if I consent certain pieces of my private information may be handed over to accredited organisations. As the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, said, that could be a mortgage provider, a bank or a retailer. When I want to buy something or get a loan, I have to give the answers to questions that are held in the database. I really would object in Sainsbury’s to having to tell the person behind the till my mother’s maiden name. As it was Jones, it would not help anyone very much in Wales. The other matter that concerns me is whether the register is accurate. I would like to see clearly set out in the Bill a right for the citizen to see what is on his file. I recall that secret files were at one time kept on lawyers by the Lord Chancellor’s Department. A colleague of mine suffered for many years from information that he subsequently discovered was on his files suggesting that, confused with me, he had lost eight successive general elections as a Liberal candidate. It held his career back enormously. Is the register accurate? Nothing in the Bill that I can see gives the citizen the right to see what is there. Even though the citizen does not know what is on the register, he is under a duty on pain of a penalty of £1,000 to notify any inaccurate information that may be on the register—which he has never seen. He has to notify every change of address from the age of 16 onwards. Does anybody begin to appreciate the bureaucracy and form-filling that that means for students, who move from one address to another? He also has to provide the times during which he has resided in different places in the United Kingdom. For six months I am in Scotland and for six months in Wales, and then I move on somewhere else, but the times that I am in those various places have to be put on the register if it is to be accurate. Every change of name has to be registered. I do not think that that is a problem for my noble friend Lady Walmsley—should I now say, since a week ago, my noble kinsman?—as she intends to retain her own name. However, many people change their names on marriage, and will be under the penalty of £1,000 if they do not fill the form in and send it off to the register. Forms, bureaucracy, cost—to what end? Surely a balance has to be struck. As a criminal practitioner, I do not see how the identity card will solve crime, dispose of terrorism and all the other things that are claimed for it. That is rubbish. I do not see what other benefits there will be for benefit fraud. As has already been said, in benefit fraud it is not so much identity that is an issue, but a person claiming when they are earning an income and so on. All that has to be weighed against the loss of my freedom. Why should the state know everything about me? How can I be manipulated in future—pressured to change my views, perhaps—by government departments because they have information about me that I wish to reserve to myself? The public have given their support in opinion polls to the concept of identity cards, but I do not think that they have really grasped the problem. The problem is not the little piece of brown cardboard that the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, and I remember being carried around during the Second World War. It is not even a little card. It is the database behind it that tells the Government everything there is to know about you. Do the people of this country want that? Do they appreciate what the Bill is about? I give way.