Identity Cards Bill

These two amendments together are really helpful in probing this Bill. Against that background, I shall try to take a thoroughly constructive approach to the Government’s objectives in the Bill in order to seek to test whether those objectives are likely to be achieved. The primary purposes of the Bill—national security, the detection and prevention of serious crime, immigration controls, unlawful working and so on—are perfectly proper objectives. The objective is to have a widespread and complete register of all the residents of this country—and, in a sense, of everyone in this country. Whether one likes it or not, I can see that there is a case to be made for having a detailed register of everyone who is in the country, whether as a citizen or a visitor; for maintaining their biometric details; and for tracking where they are going, as it is intended to do, through the identity card they will receive and have to produce every time they leave the country or make an application for some designated document. To take a simple example, if a citizen of this country applies comparatively early because they want a passport and then you find they are going regularly to Pakistan, you might begin to take rather more interest in them than you might in people who do not seem to go regularly anywhere interesting at all. I can see how that would be of some value in relation to the 80 per cent of the population who, whether you call it voluntary or compulsory, are likely to want driving licences and passports, and within a year or two are pretty likely to apply for an identity card. Then, however, as Amendment No. 47 sensibly points out, you are still left with an enormous gap, of which the first ingredient is the 20 per cent of the population that is not likely to apply voluntarily for a card. As my noble friend Lady Seccombe has said, a huge number of people come and go from this country, and from all the free societies of western Europe and elsewhere in the world, with very little record. I went to the United States in April. One now needs a visa—or a visa waiver, as they nicely call it—and one provides one’s biometric details. It is all done quite quickly. The noble Baroness gave us the figures: that system produces biometric details and identity for some millions of people. However, we are not going to do that, so we have a gap of about 20 per cent of our own population—which, if one just takes the adults, is probably 10 million people—and also of all the other people who come and go. It seems to me that this will undercut for years, until the scheme is modified, a great deal of the utility of this very expensive scheme. If we are to have the scheme, let it work; that is one approach. But if we are to have it with enormous gaps, is it right to spend so much money? I come back to what will be regarded as a less constructive approach to the Bill. None the less, I think that these are reasonable questions.