Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I wish I had enough time to deal with the points that the noble Earl has made. I do not see that we are on the verge of Armageddon, nor that the Bill will take away our traditional civil liberties. I support the principles of the Bill; I shall mention some areas of concern and also say a little about Northern Ireland. I wonder whether any of your Lordships have tried to open a building society account recently. I did so not long ago; I had to produce a passport, a council tax bill and a utility bill so that I could put a very small sum of money into a branch of, I think, the Abbey National. While I am about it, if two people are going to live together or get married, I advise them to share the utility bills between them—not the payment, necessarily, but the bills—otherwise one of them will have difficulties opening a building society account in the future, unless and until we have identity cards. We can all remember a time when no checks were needed to enter the Palace of Westminster; we could walk straight on to aircraft; there were no CCTV cameras, money laundering or people trafficking. But the world changed long before the Government decided that we needed a Bill of this sort. Some of your Lordships have talked about the relationship of the individual to the state. That altered significantly many years ago. It will not change very much because of the Bill; it changed a long time ago when we had bombings in London. Security checks were made when boarding aircraft, and so on. In practice, the Bill will not change the relationship of the individual to the state, except possibly at the margins. We now live in a world where there is terrorism, international crime and identity fraud. I shall go carefully with this example because I am not a lawyer and there are lawyers present. I was told by a legal aid solicitor that sometimes when the police stopped a motorist, for example, and summonsed that person to appear in court, on the day of the hearing a totally different person turned up, because the original individual had given someone else’s name and address. It takes the police quite a long time to disentangle that. There are more important examples. Let me mention one. I believe that a national identity register, plus ID cards, will make it harder for people who wish to hide their criminal past to avoid restrictions on, say, working with children. That is one safeguard which is difficult to deny, and there are others. Even boarding an internal flight with some airlines requires photo-identity. Our passports will have to have lots of additional data if we are to be able to travel to other countries, particularly the United States. There is nothing new in the principle the Government are putting forward in the Bill. But, of course, passports must be secure, and today’s passports are not, as noble Lords have mentioned. I serve on a sub-committee of the European Union Committee. When we had a meeting with Interpol, its head said that in every major case of terrorism a forged passport had been involved. They are easy to forge these days, but the Government’s proposals will at least make them harder to forge—perhaps not impossible, but harder. If we look at the link between passport information, as will be necessary, and ID cards, there is no great breach of our civil liberties or of the principles underlying our relationship to the state, when we have the same information on an ID card as on a passport. The key is how that information will be used and to whom it will be made available. People have talked about the effect on race relations. For the life of me, I cannot understand why ID cards will make race relations worse or will prejudice the position of ethnic minorities in this country. Stop and search goes on anyway. I am not sure that a police officer who wants to use stop-and-search powers on a black person will be inhibited or encouraged by an ID card. It seems to me that it will make no difference. If anything, the person stopped will, as my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said about his times in Paris, have the safeguard of saying, ““Here is my identity card””, which I think will stop most police officers in their tracks. I believe that in that sense ID cards will be a safeguard to individuals rather than a threat. I have three areas of concern; perhaps my noble friend can deal with them in her reply. We already exchange a great deal of information with other countries about suspected terrorists or suspected international criminals. What will happen when we have this national register? Some information it is necessary to exchange because it may help to catch terrorists. The question is how much information will be exchanged and what safeguards there will be against exchanging the sort of extra information that will be held on the register. Secondly, I am concerned about the cost—less about the difference between the cost of a passport and an ID card, and more about the suggested £30 charge for individuals who will not have a passport. That seems rather high, and I would like to feel that people who are not well off will not have to pay. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmlsley, talked about children. Young persons or their parents would find it pretty onerous if children had to pay the same amount for a passport and therefore an ID card if they were to travel. My third concern has been referred to by other noble Lords: whether large IT schemes work. We have moved a long way since some of the dramatic failures of the past, but I trust that the Government will not move in this direction unless they are certain that the IT system is sufficiently robust. I query the difficulty we have had over the years in trying to record all passport details of people entering and leaving the country. My understanding is that the computer system did not deal with that. I should like to feel it could, because that is another important check, but perhaps my noble friend can say a little about the robustness of the IT system or the safeguards that will ensure that it will be robust enough. I turn to Northern Ireland, where there are particular issues concerning identity cards. The Good Friday agreement says under the heading of ““Constitutional Issues”” under paragraph 1(vi), that the British and Irish Governments will:"““recognise the birthright of all people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland””." Some nationalists in Northern Ireland might not want to be identified as British on their identity cards. They might choose not to do so and it would be their right under the Good Friday agreement to make that decision. I wonder how the Government will handle that. I understand that discussions are going on with the Irish Government, but I am concerned that we might cause difficulties in Northern Ireland as a byproduct of this particular identity card scheme. My other concern is not so much about Northern Ireland but about Irish people resident in Britain. Some might be happy to have a British identity card, but others who have Irish nationality and not British nationality might not wish to have that sort of identity card. There might be difficulties for them. Some might be quite happy. How do we handle that? This is a sensitive issue, but my main concern is with nationalists in Northern Ireland. This is an enabling Bill. There are detailed concerns and I hope that we can deal with those in Committee. However, I accept the principle of what the Government are seeking to do.