Identity Cards Bill

The Minister has now greatly confused me. If one of the main purposes of this card is the prevention and detection of crime, surely you really do need that number on the card. That would allow a policeman stopping someone in the street to look up and find out from his ID card that they had some sort of record that needed looking at. It may be an innocuous record—it may just be that they were found speeding or something. But it is does seem that the PNC number is necessary for that purpose and is in the interest of national security. If those are the purposes of the Bill, why is this number excluded? Otherwise what purpose does the card have? At the moment only the great and the good are going to get it for the first 10 years and it looks like what we really need is a biometric index to the police national computer in order to do anything about purposes A and B of the card.