Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I am sure that we shall debate the detail of this matter in Committee as regards how the biometric data will be used. Noble Lords will know that one cannot travel to America without giving one’s fingerprints and having one’s photograph taken. If anyone has travelled to America in the past few months, they will have had that experience as, indeed, I did when I attended a conference in Atlanta. Whether one likes it or not, one’s fingerprints are taken and one’s biometric photograph is taken at the same time. That is where we are going; that is the thing that we have to recognise. My noble friend Lord Giddens was right to say that globalisation has brought about dramatic changes. The world in which we now live is significantly different from that we have inhabited to date. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, explained why that was the case in his powerful speech. Noble Lords have rightly asked whether we have the technology and the expertise and whether it will work. That has been a huge plank of today’s debate. Many concerns have been expressed about the technical viability of the prescribed scheme. We recognise that there are challenges. Projects such as this will always face such challenges and opinions in the field of technology will differ. However, the body of representations within industry, existing project experience and research by established experts in the field of biometrics and database technology indicate that we are right to proceed with our plans at this stage. As with all major government projects, the technology behind the identity card scheme will ultimately come from the industry, and key sections of the industry are telling us that the technology can work. An identity technology advisory group representing leading technology companies in this field says that if the UK decides to pursue such a scheme it will work. The industry can also point to a number of existing technology projects run successfully, including many for the United Kingdom Government using large databases. We have already referred to the UK Passport Service, the DWP payment modernisation programme, enabling direct payments; the biometrics are being used in relation to facilitating biometric passports and there are many large databases in operation already. The FBI AFIS database has 47 million sets of fingerprints, and the US MOD staff programme holds 22 million. The US-VISIT system had four million biometric records as of July 2004; at that time it was growing at the rate of 35,000 records a day. In the UK IDENT 1, the successor of NAFIS, the national automated fingerprint identification system, holds six million sets of prints. The technology that we have at the moment leads us to believe that we are in a good position. The United Kingdom Passport Service trial in June 2005, although not intended as a test of technology, showed that 100 per cent of able-bodied participants and 99.954 per cent of all participants could register at least some of the biometrics. That is why we are on record as preferring the 13 biometrics so that we can capture them. I declare an interest as someone with brown eyes and I thank noble Lords for their concern for my well-being. The UK Passport Service trial showed that through the use of multiple biometrics many such problems can be overcome. Many simply relate to the environmental conditions, which can be easily addressed.