Identity Cards Bill

The amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has a keen attraction for those interested in accurate forecasting and accountability. After all, that is what we are talking about. The idea of identifying the costs incurred by the identity cards scheme from April 2004 and for 10 years going forward would be very useful if we could define the boundaries. What is proposed in the amendment is a great broadening of the boundaries, whereas what the Government are bringing forward in their costings is related to the activities of only one department. So to try to get costings across the whole of government is very ambitious and counter-productive. With regard to the importance of what we are engaged on, this country has a slow record of streamlining the information held by government about their citizens and getting it into more usable and useful forms. We are really not up to speed with the practices in our existing and emerging competitors, and that is something that we need to attend to. We have a very complex scheme of databases which are administered in different ways to meet different needs. We have, at the turn of the century, 80 million national insurance numbers, 60 million NHS number, 30 million taxpayer numbers, 30 million people on local authority databases, 45 million people on the electoral register, and so on. In contrast, the Nordic countries seem to have done things better; they have one number and one system that tracks people all the way through, and it is not surprising that they have some pretty low costs. That is something that we need to move towards; we are in the modern age. We cannot simply stand there and say, ““Gosh, we do not know how this is all going to work””. As the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, said, people are finding the answers to those things, and we should be confident that we can find those answers technologically and managerially. The introduction of the Bill will provide things that have been discussed many times—the whole question of security protecting citizens, and so on. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the big win for us will ultimately be to make things more efficient. We have talked a lot about money. The scheme proposed by the Government has had its costs proposed by the Home Office. I should declare an interest as for a number of years I have been a director of the Home Office general board. I have not seen those costs, but they have been examined by KPMG and the Office of Government Commerce, as the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, said. Steps have been put in place to prevent the sort of mistakes being made that were made before. We also have the steely oversight of the Treasury, which is not notorious—especially at this time—for flinging money around needlessly. In terms of holding the Government to account, we have a number of £584 million for what is going to happen within the Home Office. As for other government departments, I believe that we should leave that matter alone. In this amendment, we are being asked to approve something that broadens the boundaries, but a number of factors are involved. Huge technological change has taken place, and the costs of storage and processing are dropping very rapidly. We have been talking about looking forward 10 years, but if we look back 10 years we can see what has happened in terms of technology and the emergence of specific solutions—with eBay, easyJet and Tesco’s home shopping, for example. Those are individual solutions for individual needs with a broad theme. The idea that we should produce some broad masterplan across government for using the identifier in all government departments seems rather statist, old-fashioned and totally impractical. We need to let each government department assess what it needs to do, come forward with a business case and be accountable for delivering it and getting the investment to do so, as well as getting the return on the investment and making it work. That is how we will get accountability. The accountability for the Home Office proposals has been made very clear by the Minister. We know that it is £584 million. We are all aware of the dangers of big IT; whether it is in the private or public sector, it is difficult—and I speak with some experience in that regard. You have to approach it like eating an elephant, in bite-sized pieces, taking one bit and eating it and then going on to the next. That is what we should do with this scheme. I am all for holding the Government accountable for the forecast, but they have made that forecast. I am sure that they will stand by it, and that is something that we shall all track. But to introduce this amendment would slow down the introduction of this very important legislation and the implementation of it. State security and civil liberties are important, but the amendment would hold us up in gaining the great benefits of the technological revolution that are to hand.