Identity Cards Bill

I have a couple of amendments in this group, and I support everything that my noble friend Lord Crickhowell has just said. It is, to my mind, one of the crucial parts of the Bill. We should strengthen the commissioner to the point where he can rank alongside the Information Commissioner, which provides a good model. He and the Data Protection Registrar, who preceded him, have done extremely well in protecting the public interest in some crucial areas. Although at the moment we are some way away from having ID cards, it is clear that this area will become critical, because we are moving towards a surveillance society. As the Minister has said, we are doing that because that is what we want to do. We are moving in small, well-reasoned steps, each of them taken because it offers us a public advantage. These technologies will make it much easier for us to catch criminals, to suppress crime and to order society. That is what we want to do, and from the current indications—looking at the relative penetration of cameras and similar devices in this country versus other countries in Europe—it is clear that we are well ahead of Europe in accepting and in wanting those technological security measures. Perhaps because we have so few policemen on the beat we at least want someone looking over us. None the less, it is the way that we are going, and the technological capability is increasing apace. Some of that is directly tied in to the Bill. Facial recognition, with high quality cameras, is now possible at quite some distance. When you tie that in to everyone having their facial biometrics on the ID register, you suddenly have a capability of running a camera across a crowd and knowing exactly who everyone in it is. That will be extremely useful when it comes to public disturbances or watching people running away from a crime. We are going to allow that when the time comes. When everyone’s fingerprints are on file, it will become much easier to catch up with people, for example, at boot fairs. You merely get them to sell you something, pop it in a plastic bag and you have their identity, immediately registrable against the national identity register. It is not just the things that flow immediately from the Bill that will be there. Because we all have the unique number it will key in to all sorts of other private information systems. Radio frequency identification tags are beginning to come in, and Asda has had a serious experiment with them. It is clear that the technology is becoming extremely useable. I expect in a few years’ time to march into my local branch of Marks and Spencer and be told by the shop assistant that he really thinks I should change my underpants because I bought them from him three years ago. They will have an RFID tag, and the information system pulls up exactly what I have bought in that store over the past years. That sort of technology is so useful for business that it is bound to happen. Once you have those tags they will become readable in all sorts of ways. There will not any more be the traditional detective story problem where you have to go out and visit 2,000 shops to find where a garment came from; you will just read the tag and you will know immediately where it came from. Our whole lives and our buying history—to the extent that they are not pinned down already through telephone and number plate recognition and other technology that we are now used to—will be available through this one unique number. We are going to agree to it, and anyway it is the way that society is going to be. So we had better jolly well give ourselves some decent protections. Since there is a model in our data protection legislation we can follow, we should move to that now. I know that 15 or 20 years down the road we may want something more, but now we should move to what we know we are likely to want. My amendments, supplementary to those tabled by my noble friends, are intended to achieve that.