UK Borders Bill

I have a great deal of sympathy with this amendment, which is hardly surprising since it is virtually the same as that tabled and spoken to by my honourable friend Damian Green in another place. As I explained to the Refugee Children’s Consortium, the reason I did not table an amendment myself is that when the matter was debated in Committee in another place, at the end of that debate my honourable friend made it clear that we accepted the Government’s explanations as far as they could go. He said that the Minister had, "““addressed all those individual issues very fully and very enlighteningly””.—[Official Report, Commons, UK Borders Bill Committee, 8/3/07; col. 263.]" So I am somewhat prevented from exploring the issues again. However, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is absolutely right to bring them to the attention of the Committee. I agree that it is important for the Government to put on the record how they are going to cope with the science side of ensuring that biometric information taken from children is worth being used. It will be an intrusion into a child’s life and there is the separate issue, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, of whether it is right for children to be expected to provide information. I do not address that point now because other amendments look at it in more detail and in the broader sense of human rights. However, if one looks at the scientific issues themselves, there is no doubt that several research documents point to the unreliability of biometrics when taken from children, particularly in facial recognition procedures. I would be grateful if the Minister could refer in particular to those matters. Noble Lords who took part in the debates on the Identity Cards Bill—I was glad to see that legislation move out of my life on 26 March last year; it finished its life in this House and I hope never to see its full implementation as regards a national identity register—will recall that we considered what kind of information should be covered by biometric registration. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, now the Attorney-General, told us that there would be reliability in the use of biometrics because they would come from three sources. She told us repeatedly that we could be reassured because there would be fingerprints, iris recognition and facial recognition. We looked in particular at the problems associated with taking fingerprints and how they may be damaged in children—that is less the case than in adults, but the risk is there; how with iris recognition there is always a certain failure rate; and how facial recognition for children does seem to present problems. At the time I explained in detail my own difficulties when I became a volunteer guinea pig and had my own biometrics registered. The Home Office brought its van to Black Rod’s Garden, and we were able to visit it and get our own identity documents. I thought that I would put all my prejudices aside and undergo the process. Not only did the uplink keep failing but the facial recognition was a problem. For some reason I have a difficult bone structure; they called it bland. I have a bland face; that’s me. It is an absolute shame. They took several attempts before they managed to capture enough of a facial recognition. I put up with it because I was trying to prove a point one way or the other—and, boy, did I satisfy myself that there were problems. It comes back to the questions of how reliable this will be and what it will do to children to go through it. Will they have to go through the procedure repeatedly as their facial structure changes over the years? That is the kind of information on which we need reassurance from the Minister.