Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 201:"Page 17, line 27, after ““of”” insert ““serious””" The noble Lord said: Amendments Nos. 203 and 209 are also grouped with this amendment. I suspect we are on broadly the same territory as we were with the last group of amendments, and I anticipate that the Minister will say in other words what she has just said. To put it briefly, there is a general argument that was advanced at Second Reading, and many times since, about the scope of this Bill as originally intended and the scope of the register. There has been function creep. It is fair to remember that when David Blunkett first stood up in the House of Commons and said that we were going to have national identity cards, he put it on a minimalist basis. We now have an identity card that cannot by any means be described in that way. I, along with my colleagues on these Benches—and this concern is shared widely—do not want to see this register and the information on it used for any but the most essential purposes. I briefly remind the Committee that in Clause 1, the key clause, one of the tests of something ““necessary in the public interest”” is:"““for the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime””—" any crime. The most basic, simple criminal act, such as a road traffic offence, is strictly within the purview of this Bill. I understand that issues of serious crime and national security should be within its purview, but, wherever possible and sensible, I want it confined to those categories when we get around to clauses like Clause 19, which, without the consent of the individual concerned, entitles the Secretary of State to share information on the register—including paragraph 9 information, in the case of serious crime—with the agencies enumerated in Clause 19(2). Amendment No. 203 refers to Clause 19(4), which entitles the tax authorities and Customs to have access to the information, apart from paragraph 9 information. I do not see why there should be any allowance for the tax authorities and Customs and Revenue to have access to any of that information without the consent of the citizen, other than for, as I have put it,"““the interests of national security or for the prevention or detection of serious crime””." I shall be interested to hear the Government’s justification for giving them those much wider powers. Finally, in Clause 19(7), I again want a limitation to be made on the power of the Secretary of State under that subsection to only those matters of national security or the prevention or detection of serious crime—remembering that serious crime is defined by reference to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which, it is fair to say, is a good working definition of what most people think to be serious crime. I beg to move.