Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I rise to support this Bill. I want to speak briefly not of the logical issues, which have been well covered by many speakers, but the emotional ones. I find the logic of the benefits of the Bill in a society with proliferating fragile databases overwhelming. I believe that the costs will be managed and that problems with the technology will be overcome. The Government’s recent track record in technological projects is ever improving. However, deep down, alongside that logic there is emotional opposition to this Bill. I have spent some time probing it to try to understand it better. I started the classic way by looking at civil liberties, human rights and so forth. I started by reading Magna Carta—at least a translation—the Bill of Rights and John Stuart Mill, and eventually got to the European Convention on Human Rights. Only in that last document are there any references that really relate to central concerns about the Bill. I decided that it was inevitable that I would not find any universal truths and I had better do my own research, because an emotional reaction is all about what something means to individual citizens and why they are concerned. I decided to do extensive research. It was not quite as onerous as I suggest since it was mostly done over dinner or in the pub. However, I was able to consult a wide variety of people. Although they may not have been statistically representative, the sheer variety of their reactions was a good cross-section of the emotional reactions that people have. At one end were a number of people who said, ““I see no problem, it’s as simple as that””. Indeed, people who remembered wartime said, ““It was not a problem then so what is the problem now?”” Of those people who had problems with the Bill, there were three streams of concern. First, there was a sense of loss of privacy, that one has a right to be anonymous and go through society without people seeing you. It was interesting to probe the reasons for that concern, but it is nevertheless clearly a widely felt value that one should be able to merge into society and not stand out. Secondly, there was a sense of loss of freedom of movement. I was told very passionately that the individual did not want to have to show the card or carry it. When it was pointed out that the Bill did not envisage the card being carried I was told, ““I do not even want it to exist because someone will ask to see it””. There was a sense that one has a right to move freely in one’s own country. Thirdly, perhaps not surprisingly, there was a passionate concern about the possibility of a police state. There was genuine concern, particularly among younger people who said, ““I don’t trust this Government and I didn’t trust the last one. The last thing I want to do is to give them any mechanisms to give the state more control over me””. I believe that most of those issues can be addressed and most are, at least in part, already dealt with in the Bill. However, I invite the Government to be particularly sensitive to those emotional strands, because in my experience in public life and management, how people feel is every bit as important as how they are persuaded. How can we meet some of these concerns? First, I hope that Ministers will be sensitive to how they build the suite of safeguards. There are a fair number of safeguards in the Bill against the concerns that I have expressed, but in some cases they may need to be more obvious and accessible. I told a friend that the Data Protection Act 1998 allowed him to see what is held on the database. He asked, very reasonably, ““How?””, and I could not tell him. The underlying protections that give one access to one’s own data should be easy to use and well publicised. Citizens should easily be able to discover what the register contains about them and to see the audit trail. Secondly, the sensible technological solution to introduction would be a measured introduction. We should turn that into a virtue. One person I asked about the Bill said that they had no problem with it, but would not have said that five years ago. The passage of time, the watching of events and the unwinding of the Bill and its introduction will ease these emotional strains and allow society to become more comfortable with it. Thirdly, we must have powerful oversight. I hope that Ministers will listen very carefully to representations to increase the power of the commissioner, guarantee independence, allow direct access to Parliament and, perhaps, have very high profile board members. They should be household names—people whose integrity is evident from their very high-profile public position. Parliament must do its work in that scrutiny process as we go through the various statutory instruments. As a generality, we do not give nearly enough effort to statutory instruments. The statutory instruments connected with this Bill must be considered with great care. We must do our work together with our friends in the other place to make sure that we discharge that duty. Finally, the key move in the Bill will be the move to compulsion. The Government have invented the idea of super-affirmative instruments. They may prove more trouble than they are worth. They are so unprecedented that they are likely to become messy in application. The simple use of primary legislation at that stage may be better and more straightforward and give confidence to society in general that we are doing our duty. I want the Bill to succeed and I want it to meet all the concerns that society has about it. I believe that, if we in Parliament and Government together do a good job, we will be seen as farsighted, creating a secure basis for an increasingly unstable technological world.