Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, the last time the Minister spoke at the Dispatch Box on this subject, she put down a challenge to your Lordships’ House, which perhaps she will allow me to take up. She put the question, ““What’s new?””. In other words, she was saying: why do we continue with our obstinate and futile opposition to the Government’s will? I would like to try and explain. What is new is that we have now had a chance, which we did not have before, to inspect the Government’s responses to our original objections. The Minister said that there had been—I think this is the phrase she used—an ““infelicitous use of language””, and that that was the explanation for any misleading impression that had been created by the Government’s manifesto. But then, in another place, the Home Secretary said that no misleading impression had been created because passports were in fact voluntary, in a bizarre throwback to some sort of socialist past. I think his explanation was that foreign travel was some sort of luxury for rich people. So first there was a misleading impression in your Lordships’ House; then, in another place, there was not. Finally, when the Bill came back to your Lordships’ House again, the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, said, uncharacteristically, that it did not make any difference whether a misleading impression had been created, because no one reads manifestos and what the Government write down. It is completely unacceptable, in this House of all Houses of Parliament, to be told that an infelicitous use of language is not a major matter. We in this House are prepared, with pride, to debate for hours or days an amendment that might read ““delete ‘a’, insert ‘the’””, and we know why we do it. It is the very essence of what we are here for. On the question of whether passports are voluntary, I would like to present to the Minister a list which has nothing to do with foreign travel as some sort of optional luxury. There are occasions when one third of the entire population of Britain—the 15 million people over the age of 17 who do not have a driving licence—are required to show a passport. It is not a voluntary act at all when they apply for a mortgage, purchase a property, rent a property, visit a prison, get divorced, teach children, become an executor of a will or collect a bus pass. In a recent case, the daughter of a pensioner wanted to collect her mother’s pension because she was seriously ill. The daughter went to the post office to collect it and was told she would not be able to without producing her own passport.