Identity Cards Bill

That is a perfectly proper thing to say. Noble Lords will know that if you are stopped in the street regarding a motor vehicle incident the police officer is currently entitled to say ““Produce your details to the local police station within a certain number of days””. Nothing in the Bill changes that. Many people will find it useful. In order to avoid the necessity of producing documents later—perhaps identification—they can choose to produce the ID card. They will not have to, but it would obviously save a lot of time if it was used in that way. But it would not be compulsory. To come back to some of the problems we face, particularly in relation to terrorism but also in relation to how organisations such as al-Qaeda work, its training manuals require its operatives to acquire false identities to hide their terrorist activities. Judge Jean-Louis Brugueiere, who is France’s top counter-terror investigator, was reported in the Times on 1 June 2005 as saying that identity cards will help Britain to protect itself from attacks by Al-Qaeda sympathisers. It is surely right that we should provide the police and the security services with the best support we can to help safeguard national security. That includes this Bill. However, the addition of the word ““terrorism”” to the reference to national security in Clause 1(4)(a) is unnecessary. Terrorist acts are crimes. We cannot get away from that. The Bill already provides for the scheme to be used in combating terrorism through the reference to the prevention and detection of crime. Preventing terrorism is also covered by the existing reference in Clause 1(4)(a) to national security. I add that the statutory purposes of the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ, as set out in the legislation, do not contain a separate mention of terrorism; and to suggest that it is needed in this context might cast doubt on whether anti-terrorism work was within the lawful activities of those bodies.