Identity Cards Bill

Let us not think of this as a one-off application. Clause 12 states that if there is a change of circumstances affecting the information recorded about a person in the register, you are then subject to a requirement to notify. You may then be required to attend at a specified place and time for your fingerprints to be taken again; for your biometric information to be taken and recorded; for you to be photographed; and to provide any information that is required by the Secretary of State. What are these circumstances? Any change of name. You would have to do that if you wanted to change your name on marriage. If you changed your address, you would have to give notice; if you changed your work number; if you acquired a designated document—and I go back to the debate we had on that. One of the virtues of the identity card scheme, it is said by the Government, is that it prevents benefit fraud. One has to assume that if you draw benefit and you obtain a document to entitle you to draw benefit, with numbers on it, that is one of the documents that will be designated under Clause 4(2)(b). There will be a change of circumstance when you apply for benefit and when you cease to be entitled to benefit. A dog licence could become a designated document under subsection (2)(a)—it is a change of circumstance. Every change of circumstance which may happen once, twice or three times a year lays you open to a requirement to attend at one of these centres to be interviewed, to be photographed and for your particulars to be gone into all over again. If you do not, you are a defaulter—shades of the congestion charge here—subject to large fines for which you can be pursued no doubt through the Northampton county court or a similar gulag somewhere in England. That is what is promised to us by the Government. You must notify a change of circumstance—if you do not, you are a defaulter. I believe that, unameliorated by the amendments, which I support, Clause 12 will see the Bill off. I cannot imagine that the people of this country will stand for form-filling every time there is a change of circumstance on pain of being described as a defaulter and pursued for large sums of money. The people of this country will rise up and reject it.