Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I pay tribute to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Soley, although he is not present. I do so because he and I entered Parliament—the House of Commons—together on 3 May 1979 and we worked together in the House. I expected from his past that he would give an assured and amusing speech and he certainly lived up to that expectation. Surprisingly, everyone on this side who has spoken so far has supported the principle of the Bill and the Bill itself. I am going to be no exception. I have to confess that I have listened to speeches opposing it from those opposite and have some difficulty understanding why they are against it. In particular, I have to ask those who are supporters of the European Union how identity cards can be an intrusion of privacy and civil liberties in this country when so many of our democratic partners within the European Union insist that their citizens have them. I believe that 21 out of 25 countries in Europe have ID cards. I am assured by the Home Secretary that under the Schengen agreement, whereby people move within Europe using just identity cards, the relevant authorities are looking to introduce a common, biometric identity card so that all the countries involved can have the same system. Although the United States of America is not introducing its own identity cards, next year it will insist that people from this country visiting the USA either have a biometric passport or go to the considerable expense and inconvenience of obtaining a visa. The 80 per cent of the population who have passports will either get a biometric passport straight away or they will do so when they renew their passports. As I said, banks are concerned about the level of card fraud and therefore seek to introduce biometric bank cards as soon as possible. Certainly the Japanese banks are considering a common system in that regard. I am surprised that no one so far has mentioned my next point. All of us who work in the parliamentary estate, from the Prime Minister to the cleaner, or from the cleaner to the Prime Minister, whichever way you wish to put it, have to carry an identity card. It is a very poor identity card. Apart from the photograph there is no way of recognising whether or not the person who is wearing it is the person who it is supposed to describe. That is fine for us but it is not necessarily fine for everyone who works on the estate. I am fairly certain that within a short time those who are in charge of the security of these buildings will insist on our identity cards being biometric. It is not the only way but it is one way of guaranteeing someone’s identity. Nearly all of us trust computer systems. Perhaps I am reasonably unique in this place but I buy goods on the Internet. I give the details of my bank card to the companies from which I buy goods. I tax my car on the Internet. I top up my pay-as-you-go phone on the Internet. All the time I assume that the computer system I am using is trustworthy and so far I have been proved right. The noble Lord, Lord Waddington, said that he did not want people to gain information about him. He and I have travelled home from here on the same bus, using our freedom passes which Ken Livingstone so kindly gives us because we are pensioners. London Transport knows our addresses and dates of birth. It has to have that information. It also knows exactly which bus we travelled on and the time we travelled. If you are travelling on the Underground, your ticket tells you where you got on and where you got off. Therefore, I do not understand why the noble Lord is so concerned about this issue. All of us have passports, bankcards, library cards and wallets stuffed full of cards with which we prove our identity, and we have no difficulty in doing so. How many noble Lords would deny security the right to ask for their pass if security so wished it, or say, ““I am not showing my passport when I come back into the country””? Of course, they would not. Those who oppose the Bill and the introduction of identity cards seek to deprive those 20 per cent who are less fortunate—the 20 per cent who do not have passports tend to be the unemployed, pensioners and the elderly—of services and privileges that we enjoy and take for granted. If you fly on Ryanair—perhaps I should not mention Ryanair today—or easyJet, you will find that they demand a passport or identity card before they allowing passengers to board internal UK flights. I am not talking about external flights. Recently two of my relatives flew from Glasgow to Bournemouth for the princely sum of £47.