Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do not insist on its Amendment 4, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason No. 4A. Amendment No. 4 limited the public interest test as defined in Clause 1(4), in so far as public services go to preventing illegal or fraudulent access to public services. This would potentially limit the benefits to the public from the introduction of identity cards supported by a national identity register. I hope that all noble Lords, on all sides of the House, would want to see the identity card scheme used to help make the delivery of public services better, not just as a way of combating fraud. It is surely in everyone’s interest to help deliver public services more efficiently and effectively. That must be in the interests of the public, both as taxpayers and as users of services. Inefficiency in public services is of no benefit to anyone—apart perhaps from the fraudster. Transforming public services will be helped by being able to provide a secure, reliable and fast way of confirming identity. That is why we believe it would be wrong to regard the use of identity cards as simply a guard against fraud. Of course combating fraud will be one of the purposes of the identity cards scheme—and a very important one—but not the only one. We believe that the public will want the introduction of identity cards to be used as a way of helping public services deliver quicker and better services. This, for example, could include the future development of services over the Internet. We see real advantages in being able to fill in one form instead of many. We would go further and say that it would be possible to create a single ““one-stop”” procedure for updating addresses on government department records, so that when someone moves house and notifies the new address to the National Identity Register that new address is notified onwards to the departments dealing with national insurance, pensions, driving licences and so on. That would make life easier for the citizen and would ensure that other departments did not continue to hold out-of-date and inaccurate records. Such a scheme would be designed to enable more efficient and effective delivery of public services and to help the citizen. It would be hard to argue that it was needed just as a fraud prevention measure, which is what Amendment No. 4 would suggest. For any requirement to use identity cards to access public services there are already provisions and safeguards at Clauses 15 and 16 and it could not be a requirement to produce an identity card to access free public services or to claim any state benefits until we move to compulsion when everyone would have an identity card. So, by restricting the statutory purposes of the scheme only to combating illegal or fraudulent access to public services, we would be defining the card scheme far too narrowly and would risk restricting the usefulness of the identity cards scheme to the public, which, after all, is one of the key purposes of the identity cards scheme. We believe that we should not prevent the identity cards scheme being used as a way of helping to deliver better public services. It is not just a question of combating fraudulent use of public services, we also should be using the identity cards scheme to help to transform services. When these amendments were considered in the other place, Amendment No. 4 was rejected without a Division. I invite this House to do the same, as it is clearly not in the public interest to make this change. Moved, That this House do not insist on its Amendment No. 4, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason No. 4A.—(Baroness Scotland of Asthal.)