Serious Crime Bill [HL]

Indeed, 40 years ago. What a time. She and her husband have a thing about television. We pull their legs about it. They will not have a television in the house and never have in all the years of their marriage. Magistrate and upstanding member of the community though she is, she was in receipt of the kind of letter to which my noble friend Lord Crickhowell referred. In its unwisdom, TV Licensing has determined that nobody in the very respectable town in Essex where she lives—I will not say exactly where she lives—could possibly do without a television. It accused her of fraud. She invited its staff into her home to try to find a television, if they dared. Certainly, data matching is not necessarily efficacious or fair upon its subjects. The Minister picked up on the comments of my noble friend Lord Crickhowell about ID cards. We are all warriors in this regard. We remember—I shall not say with fond memories—the exchanges on the Identity Cards Act, as I regret to say it now is, for the time being. The Minister chided my noble friend when he talked about passports and said that, when she addressed that issue on that Bill, she talked about the importance of biometric information. We were given a graphic illustration of what she had talked about—facial recognition, iris scans and fingerprints. We were assured that all those three things would be brought together to make the perfect whole. So why have the Government dropped iris recognition as one of the biometrics? It undermines my confidence in what the Government will do in securing information in this country. This is a first throw of the dice in looking at the appropriateness of government using information that may be collated on individuals. There are very proper reasons why government may seek to use data matching and data mining. We are all concerned that those who perpetrate fraud are becoming moreand more adept at so doing as they manipulate information technology. All those years ago when I was a student I used to do vacation work in the Inland Revenue. I trawled through information to find out whether people were sending in claims for children whose ages and number they seemed to forget. They were perpetrating fraud on a rather minor scale. However, that has escalated on a national scale and involves millions upon millions of pounds. We are friends with the Minister in trying to root out fraud but we may diverge on the extent to which we should transgress the liberty ofthe subject in seeking information. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.