Identity Cards Bill

Last night my noble friend Lord Northesk rendered the Committee a service by enabling us to debate the subject of convenience. We return to that subject with this group of amendments but, as the noble Earl has indicated, there may be an even more important set of questions than that which simply concerns convenience. My noble friend was probably wrong when he said that all those who make applications for passports or apply to join the register would necessarily be required to provide all that information. The subsection that we are dealing with simply defines ““registrable fact””. However, Clause 5 enables the Secretary of State to prescribe what information should be provided and, as the Government have listed all those registrable facts, we must start by assuming that the Secretary of State may ask for all the information on the list. My second introductory comment is that not all the information described as a registrable fact must be entered on the register. Under Schedule 1, personal information that may be recorded in an individual’s entry includes,"““the address of his principal place of residence in the United Kingdom””" and,"““the address of every other place in the United Kingdom where he has a place of residence””." But it does not refer to the past and the clauses on previous residences, to which I will refer. Last night, the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, described himself as ““a simple lawyer.”” I think some of us raised our eyebrows at this description. I am not a lawyer at all and when I first looked at the Bill, I assumed that ““residence”” was something which would be defined in such a way that lawyers would understand and would have a universal application that I could very quickly discover by enquiring at the Library. I went to the Library; they referred me to two works with which the noble Baroness will be very familiar: Curzon’s Dictionary of Law and Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary of Words and Phrases. I discovered that the situation is much more complicated than I had imagined. What a residence is depends very much on the situation and the particular Act of Parliament with which we are dealing. To take an obvious example, for the purposes of getting ourselves on the register of electors, the residence in question is where we happen to be on a particular night. It may include a tent or caravan, or wherever we are spending that night. I turned hopefully to Curzon to start the operation and discovered that a ““residence”” is a"““place where a person abides, i.e., where he has his home””." I was not sure that took me a great deal further, but below I discovered that an ““habitual residence”” was defined in R v BarnetLBC as,"““a voluntary residence with a degree of settled purpose””." The simple lawyer, like the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, will doubtless know exactly what that means, but the non-lawyer will not necessarily be much the wiser. Then I got into Stroud and the whole thing became even more complicated. Under the definition ““reside, residence, resident,”” I read that,"““a condition to a gift of a house that the donee takes actual possession of it, ‘as and for his residence and place of abode’, and continue during his life to reside therein, does not imply that the donee must continue personally to reside in the house; he will satisfy the condition by keeping up the house as a place of residence in which he and (or?) some of the members of his family occasionally dwell.””" I do not think that is the intention of the present Bill. Then we have the situation of the Army officer who had a place of residence that was deemed not actually to be a residence, because he had let it and was living in Germany while serving in the Army. I think we need to know exactly what the Government’s intentions are. Let us take the example of many Members of this House. My noble friend Lord Northesk has already touched upon this in respect of Members of Parliament. Many of us have two homes, one of which may be in the country, and another that we live in when in London in order to attend this House. In my case I have a house in the country and my wife has a house in London where I live when attending this House. I met a noble Lord at dinner whose wife is Spanish. He tells me that she has two houses in Spain and he has two in this country. In addition, some people may have a holiday home in, say, France and all those may be defined as residences. To complicate issues, I recall that when I was a Minister, a Minister’s principal home was deemed to be in London. Fortunately, when we come to this place and start claiming our parliamentary expenses, our principal home may prove to be in the country. Furthermore, many students live at home with their families and spend some time at university. We need to know what requirements may be imposed on them. My Amendment No. 24 limits the requirement to name your principal residence in the United Kingdom. My noble friends Lady Anelay and Lady Seccombe and I have tabled a string of amendments attempting to restrict the definition either by saying that you have to live there for three months; that students do not have to register their place at university unless they have been there for three months; and so on. My noble friend Lord Northesk raised a whole string of examples which I had not thought of; for example, hospitals, hospices and prisons. All of them fall within the definition. Before we go much further, we must have a clear definition of the Government’s intention in this respect. I turn to the second set of issues that we must consider. I notice a requirement that we should go back, presumably to the age of 16, to record all the places we have lived in. We must not only record those places but remember the dates when we arrived and left. It is a pretty extraordinary demand. I cast my mind back to 1953 when I was a National Service officer. I suppose that for part of that year my residence was in Jamaica. Perhaps visits to Taipa, Bermuda and a spell on two of Her Majesty’s ships were not long enough to qualify as residential. But then I went to Germany where I was probably in residence. Having finished my service, I returned to live at my parents’ home in Chiswick and then I went up to Cambridge University for a spell. I am not clear from the Bill whether I am required to record not only all those places but the time when I was there. I hope that in reply the Minister will say that of course it is not the Government’s intention that we should have to do such unreasonable things. However, as the Bill stands, that could be the position. I think we are entitled to know what the Government’s intentions are on this matter. That takes me to one further point. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Gould, is not with us today. Yes, he is here! The noble Lord, Lord Gould, tells us that this is a hugely popular measure, as does the Minister. I have been reading carefully the document I was urged to read during yesterday’s debate. Page 33 of the document issued by the Home Office states:"““This exercise demonstrates the importance of making it very clear to citizens what conditions they are judging the scheme on before they are asked to agree or disagree to the scheme””." The document makes it very clear that their attention was drawn to the possible costs of the scheme. We know from our earlier debates that estimates of those costs are completely misleading and almost worthless, but, none the less, a number of cost options were drawn to their attention. Also drawn to their attention was the fact that they might have to go to places to register and that it might take up to an hour. No reference was made to the fact that they were going to have to record all the places where they had lived at any time in their lives since the age of 16. I am taking 16 as the age because that is the age at which people are going to come into the scheme as it stands. Once they understand that they are going to be asked for this information, that they will be liable to quite severe penalties if they fail to provide it accurately, and that its accuracy can be checked, they may not be quite so much in favour of the scheme as they were previously. So at this stage, when we are taking only an early look at the detail of the scheme, it is important that the Government clarify their intentions. If we are going to have a scheme, I think that we all want it to be reasonably practical and easy to operate. One of our amendments suggests that the record of residence should not have to go back more than six years. That would at least ease the problem of looking back into the far distant past which I have identified. If we were to restrict the clause further so that we would not have to list anywhere where we did not spend three months in every year, it would simplify matters a good deal. There may be other ways in which we can make this a more practical and sensible measure. Is it really necessary to divulge to Her Majesty’s Government every possible bolt-hole that we may have in any part of the world where we may want to go for a few weeks of peace and quiet? Of course I understand that they must have, and be pretty confident about, a principal residence where we can be pinned down and where people can, if not find us, at least convey requests and information to us by whatever method is chosen by government. But to ask us to identify every single possible place where we may put our heads for a few nights and which falls within a definition of residence is totally unreasonable. It will cause the scheme to be probably unworkable and certainly unpopular. In the hope and expectation that the Government have worked out a much more sensible arrangement and are—dare I say it?—going to reveal it to an astonished Committee tonight, I support my noble friend’s amendment and hope that we get a positive response.