Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, it is pretty obvious from the debate that the Government will have a certain amount of difficulty getting the Bill on to the statute book so far as this House is concerned. I would like to put my position simply: I have always supported the need for a national identity register. Thus, I support the purpose behind the Bill, but I do not support the way in which the Bill proposes to achieve those purposes. I shall explain why in a moment. First, I would like to deal—from my own perspective, anyway—with the fundamentalist libertarian objections to an ID measure, such as worries the Liberal Democrats in particular. It is the functions of a state that make such a measure necessary. The very concept of a state, rather than a primitive anarchical society, means that the state must have information about those within its borders if it is to perform its fundamental functions of keeping security from external and internal threats and of helping those of its citizens who need help. I am a Burkean Conservative. I believe that the role of a state is to hold the ring—to protect the citizen from exploitation or ill treatment, whether as an individual, consumer, employee or investor, in times of sickness, childhood or ill health. That is where I come from, but there is nothing new in that I shall refer quickly to two other obvious historical examples, which go back a couple of thousand years. The first comes from the first two verses of Chapter 2 of St Luke’s Gospel:"““In those days a decree was issued by the Emperor Augustus for a general registration throughout the Roman world. This was the first registration of its kind; it took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria””." Another example, about a thousand years later, was William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, which was a very full record of his property-holding subjects. It not only identified a tax base but codified a feudal social system that lasted for the next 800 years and is still of some use today. We must recognise that the function of the state requires such information in various ways. The state should have a link, via a number, between the name and the biometric details of a person. A card can produce its own problems. First, it produces all those emotive fears of tyranny and dictatorship—““Vos papiers, monsieur”” and so on. Secondly, I refer to a point made by my noble friend Lord Waddington: it seems that, as proposed by the Government, the card could lead to forgery because, as I understand it, it is to have on it a chip incorporating the biometric details of the holder. Last year, I took part in the passport service biometrics enrolment trial. My ““demonstration card””, as it is called—it states that I must not use it for anything—has a chip containing my photograph, fingerprints and iris recognition pattern. But if the chip is on the card, therein lies the danger. If someone presents a card with a name on it and the chip is used to identify what that person shows when he presses his finger or shows his eyes, it will be very easy for al-Qaeda or anyone else cleverly to produce a false card. It is essential not that the biometric details are on the card but that they are held centrally somewhere different, so that down the line the investigating people can take the biometric details from the person concerned and check them with the central register. That is how it should work.