Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interest. I have recently accepted an appointment as a special adviser to the Enterprise Privacy Group, an association of organisations—both private and public sector—working in partnership to assess and understand privacy-related issues and to achieve collaborative solutions. I should add that my involvement with the group is unpaid. As the noble Baroness told us in her lucid introduction, we have been here before. The Bill is in substance the same measure as we debated before the election. I am sure it will surprise no one that in the intervening period my distaste for it has not been assuaged. Notwithstanding some vague tinkering with the drafting, I continue to have deep misgivings about it both on grounds of principle and of practicality. That said, I acknowledge that a fundamental responsibility of government, and therefore of Parliament, is to enact measures aimed at defending the security of the nation. I can therefore accept that the statutory purposes of the Bill are valid, but I cannot and do not accept that the proposed scheme represents a proportionate mechanism to resolve these matters. Your Lordships will recall that at our previous Second Reading I focused on three distinct themes. As it happens, the relevance and import of those criticisms has manifestly deepened since we last considered the Bill. I begin with the technological aspects. To state the obvious, the success or failure of the scheme envisaged by the Bill is wholly dependent upon the viability of the technology that underpins it. For myself, I stand by the proposition that, because the stated purposes of the scheme are myriad, disparate, vague and unfocused the technological architecture of the proposed scheme will inevitably be equally vague and unfocused. As with previous major public sector IT projects, irrespective of the party of government at the time, this is not a good augury, neither as to viability nor indeed the cost of the scheme. In this context, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, has already revealed, the past few weeks have seen a rash of adverse comment from within the industry as to the scheme’s proposed design and the technology underpinning it. In particular, the noble Lord quoted Jerry Fishenden, the national technology officer of Microsoft UK, as expressing grave concern that the centralised database that is so intrinsic to the proposed scheme could well give rise to a massive escalation of identity-related crime. For my part, I merely add this observation from Mr Fishenden:"““There are better ways of doing this. Even the biometrics industry says it is better to have biometrics stored locally””." Perhaps more importantly, Roberto Tavano, a biometric specialist for the US company Unisys, which is a likely bidder for the scheme, has commented:"““A national ID card for the UK is overly ambitious, extremely expensive and will not be a panacea against terrorism or fraud, although””," he adds,"““it will make a company like mine very happy””." Even the Government, on the basis of trials conducted to date, have been forced to admit that, contrary to their expectations, the technology will not provide adequate infallibility from a single biometric for the scheme to be workable for the whole of the UK population, a point highlighted by my noble and learned friend Lord Lyell of Markyate. Nor can they draw comfort from their insistence that reliance upon multiple biometrics will resolve this difficulty. As John Daugman of the computer laboratory at Cambridge University has pointed out, the combination of a relatively strong and relatively weak biometric test will tend to give rise to an overall result that is likely to offer a significantly worse performance than the weaker of the two original results. Given the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, I apologise immensely for making that point immediately after him. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, takes the view that intuition may suggest the opposite. Nevertheless, while I do not propose to take your Lordships through the mathematics, there is undoubtedly a very real problem here. I turn to the second of my previous criticisms of the Bill—that is, the fact that the real aim of the proposed scheme is to establish a centralised national identity database rather than an ID card system. This issue caused concern to the constitutional committee in its previous report on the Bill. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Holme, touched upon it earlier today. As the committee commented:"““When the scheme is fully in place, the role of identity cards themselves will be secondary to the database of information regarding the personal history on a life-long basis of every individual in the Register””." It added:"““It will be possible, once all the biometric information is recorded, for the authorities, by scanning anyone who is or should be on the register, to check their identity and access information about them without recourse to the identity card itself””." The importance of this should not be underestimated. The internal logic of the scheme is that, so far as it is possible for current biometric technology to deliver adequate levels of accuracy—something which, as I have already implied, is far from certain at the moment or, indeed, for the foreseeable future—the registered individual himself is to all intents and purposes the card. In other words—as successive Home Office Ministers have all but claimed—identity cards themselves are wholly redundant to the scheme. Little wonder, therefore, that the Government are so sanguine about compelling us to carry them. Moreover, given that Clause 1(1) confers responsibility for the maintenance of the register on the Secretary of State, there is a palpable sense in which control of the identities of registered individuals—I do not necessarily say ownership—vests in the Government of the day. Like the constitutional committee, I find this deeply worrying. There is a further aspect of this that merits attention which other noble Lords have already touched upon. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, cited the relevant passage from the Government’s manifesto; namely, the commitment to,"““introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports””." Additionally, my noble friends Lady Anelay, Lord Waddington and others have already explained the way in which the Bill forces compulsion by default upon the individual, certainly so far as concerns registration. This, combined with the fact that identity cards are, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant to the operation of the scheme—and here I offer due deference to the views of the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours—renders the Bill inconsistent with the manifesto. The waters are further muddied by a Motion passed by the Scottish Parliament in February of this year, a point to which my noble friend Lady Carnegy has already alluded. Within the text of the Motion are the unequivocal statements that,"““the Parliament . . . believes the proposals to be flawed on political, technical and financial grounds””," and,"““the Parliament . . . is concerned that the national identity card and database offer an ineffective response to problems of security and fraud and pose an unacceptable risk to civil liberties””." Like the Scottish Parliament, I can accept that, in terms, this so-called enabling Bill is a reserved matter. Nevertheless, I question how true to the spirit of the devolutionary settlement it is for this Westminster Parliament to impose ““compulsion by default”” on Scotland, especially in light of the fact that its democratic process has determined that the proposed scheme is wholly undesirable. Finally, I turn to the point of principle—that is, the proposition that the Bill fundamentally alters the relationship between the individual and the state. I know of no objective independent commentators who say anything other than that the proposed scheme represents a serious assault upon our liberties. As A.C. Grayling puts it:"““the expert bodies best informed on matters of law, human rights and civil liberties are unanimous in their opposition: the Law Society, Liberty, JUSTICE . . . Privacy International . . . and others, even among them the Information Commissioner, criticise the proposals””." Within Parliament, the Home Affairs Select Committee in another place, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and, as amply revealed by the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Holme, the constitutional committee have all expressed considerable disquiet. Stakeholder groups—including many of the unions, the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and so on—have ongoing and voluble concerns about the Bill, no doubt reflecting the fact that, if enacted as currently drafted, its more insidious elements will affect the most vulnerable in society disproportionately. Yet in the face of such comprehensive and consistent opposition, the Government have sailed blithely on, holding to the Home Secretary’s anodyne proposition that, in some mystical way, the current proposals for ID cards will ““control”” the so-called big brother state, or to the Prime Minister’s fatuous justification for the scheme—namely, that it is an idea ““whose time has come””. The reality is that the Bill, as drafted, will not only diminish our liberties but will also undermine our historic adherence to the rule of law. In terms, it establishes an executive system of control of the individual citizen by reference to his/her identity. Again, A.C. Grayling outlines the effects of this far more eloquently than I can. He says:"““To be obliged—required, forced by law—to have such a document is to be a conscript in a system, whether one wishes it or no””." Adding, for good measure, that,"““Possession of an ID card is analogous to having to prove to the authorities that you are innocent, instead of them having to prove their case against you””." Here we should remember that the underlying intention of the Bill is that, notwithstanding the inherent weaknesses of the technology, the registered person should be the card by virtue of his or her biometrics. In other words, the force of the conscription envisaged by the Bill is far more pernicious, and that much deeper, than one might at first suppose. I have no doubt that the Minister will seek to dismiss these criticisms in her winding-up speech. So be it. But I cannot help feeling that this is of a piece with an increasingly apparent attribute of the current Administration. Writing in last week’s Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer articulated the point in this way:"““What we now have is a government that sees its role as that of controller, rather than as enabler””." Indeed, there is a palpable sense in which the Government now perceive their responsibility to be to rule, rather than govern, us. The distinction is not merely semantic. I hold to the conviction that governments—all governments of whatever political hue—should be servants of the people. Yet the Bill will do much to deliver the reverse. It will move us inexorably towards being servants of the state. Bluntly, I am unconvinced, given the marginal nature of the potential benefits on offer, that this is a bargain that we should knowingly or willingly enter into.