Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to make a very brief contribution to this debate. One feature of being an elected politician is that one’s opinions are frequently and, sometimes, painfully tested in the furnace of public opinion. When the Government announced that they were consulting on identity cards in August 2002, I decided to hold a consultation in my constituency. I sent the consultation paper to 100 organisations and individuals in Bristol East. That was followed up by a meeting with the then Minister, my right honourable friend Beverley Hughes MP, for her to be able to explain in more detail what the scheme would entail and for people who had contributed to the consultation to talk to her about it and to give their views. Their written responses were overwhelmingly in favour, as they were during the course of the consultation. Most of the arguments advanced that morning have been aired—principally by my noble friends—but there was one that I have not heard from any noble Lord. It came from Asian women. My constituency was in the inner-city, by and large, and contained some areas of extreme deprivation. Those women lived in an area of Bristol that was not wealthy. They were passionately in favour of identity cards and wanted them as soon as possible. They said: ““We either do not have passports or do not have access to our passports because our husbands or fathers have them. We are not allowed to have bank accounts. We do not have savings accounts. We do not have store cards. We do not have utility bills. We do not exist. If we are victims of domestic violence and we go to the local authority housing office, wanting to be rehoused—by the way, people for the local authority housing office were there that day, who confirmed this—we cannot prove who we are. That puts the local authority in a really difficult position in helping us, because they must know who we are. So, if the Government made the scheme compulsory, we could go to our husbands or fathers and say, ‘We must do this’, and we would become someone””. So let us remember when we talk about people’s human rights that there are people who do not have the human rights that many of us take for granted who live in this country.