Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 90:"Page 40, line 19, leave out paragraph (c)." The noble Earl said: In moving Amendment No. 90, with the leave of the Committee, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 110 and 171. Amendment No. 90 proposes the deletion of Schedule 1(2)(c). In the context of the scheme, an individual’s fingerprints will merely be another digitised biometric, essentially of the same character as those for iris or facial recognition. Therefore, to identify them separately is otiose. My other two amendments, to Clauses 5 and 12 respectively, have the same objective. Moreover, there is no indication in the Bill precisely what form of fingerprints it is envisaged will be used. Clause 43 defines fingerprint as:"““in relation to an individual . . . a record (in any form and produced by any method) of the skin pattern and other physical characteristics or features of any of his fingers””." The Minister will recall that in response to a Starred Question that I asked about the UK prison estate she alluded to a number of different mixes of biometrics used in that context, including ““hand geometry””. Any one of a number of routes could be adopted for fingerprints in respect of the scheme, but the Bill is silent on the matter. Will the requirement be limited to a single digit or applied to all 10? Perhaps the Home Office is contemplating full palmprints; presumably that is the same as hand geometry and consistent with criminal fingerprint legislation. Moreover, as my noble and learned friend Lord Lyell of Markyate made plain at Second Reading, a distinction has to be made between an analogue and a digitised system. All these factors are linked inextricably to the eventual cost and reliability of the scheme. That in turn infers that the form of fingerprint or fingerprints—in fact, the whole range of biometric identifiers to be used in the scheme—should be stated explicitly in the Bill rather than being left to subordinate legislation. Having said all that, of course I recognise that throughout our debates the Minister has consistently referred to a total of 13 biometric identifiers. This suggests that the Government have already made up their collective mind about the appropriate way forward on the matter. That being so, there is no practical reason why the detail cannot be written into the Bill. I beg to move.