Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, but it will not work in that way if the biometric details on the card are used. Someone could have faked the card, complete with the valid biometric details for that person. The United States immigration service already checks the fingerprints and facial records of all arrivals against earlier records. It is building up its own database without basing the information on biometrics that exist. It takes your biometric details when you arrive using your two index fingers and your iris. That is way ahead of what the UK Immigration Service can do. That brings me to one of my main concerns about the Government’s aspirations. I simply do not believe that the Home Office is capable of introducing such a system as the Bill envisages—probably at any price. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, will be well aware of the shambles that occurred at the Home Office over an attempt to set up a central register of firearm certificate holders, which is required by Section 39 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997—I repeat: 1997. It still has not been done, although only some 300,000 records are needed. Since 1998, Lord Williams of Mostyn, the noble Lords, Lord Bassam and Lord Rooker, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and most recently the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, herself, have told the House that the Government are fully committed to meeting their obligations under the Act. In June, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, told me in a Written Answer that the Government were fully committed. Yet, on 10 October this year she said that efforts had failed once again and would be rescheduled for the autumn. The noble Baroness will probably know that we are to have an Unstarred Question on that failure, scheduled to take place, I believe, before Christmas. I hope that she will bring some news of progress on the matter, otherwise what possible hope can we have of introducing an ID card? It is not that large-scale computer systems in the public sector necessarily fail. I have mentioned two that work extremely well: the vehicle registration centre at Swansea, which has been going for 25 years, and Ken Livingstone’s London congestion charge system, which works all too well for some of us—as a by-product, it gives much help to the police. The Home Office is the problem. Let me mention one or two other defects. It is a mistake to limit the scheme to people of 16 years and over. Everyone born in the United Kingdom is given a National Health Service number. Interestingly, those NHS numbers were the same numbers as the old wartime identity cards to which reference has been made by a number of noble Lords. Recently, for reasons that I have never understood, all those numbers were changed to a new series. Why not, therefore, give the identity number and card, if there is to be one, at birth? Why not scrap the national insurance numbers that have been discredited for years? Perhaps the Minister will tell us how many more national insurance numbers exist than there are people in the system. Last time I heard, it was over a million. I was interested to hear that from 2007 the first applicants for passports are to have personal interviews. Two of my grandchildren, now aged two and a half and five months, have had passports since they were three months old. At what age does this personal interview start? I can assure noble Lords that they would do their best. There would be much more support if the Bill were to propose to scrap other numbers and focus on one number for the NHS, national insurance, passports, tax, criminal records and so on. We might then achieve some net savings. The information could be satisfactorily protected electronically. I shall do my best to support the Government in what they want to do, but frankly they will have to do it rather better than is proposed in the Bill at the moment.