Identity Documents Bill

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and may I take this opportunity to welcome you to your elevated status in the Chair? I commend hon. Members on both sides of the House for their maiden speeches, and welcome the Home Secretary and other Home Office Ministers to the Dispatch Box. I wholeheartedly support the Bill for three reasons, the first of which is basic principle: I believe in a country in which the state is accountable to the citizen, not the other way round. ID cards would reverse that relationship through the national identity register, a central database that hoards vast amounts of personal data on every citizen and that is open to the sprawling arms of Government, who would be able to widen access still further by order, not primary legislation. In addition, the database is run by the state sector, which has an appalling record on safeguarding our personal data. Despite all the spin from the previous Government, they planned eventually to have a compulsory ID card regime: they would not rule out making it impossible to renew or apply for a passport without one. My second reason for supporting the Bill is that ID cards simply cannot, will not and could never do what it says on the tin. They were proposed in the aftermath of 9/11, initially as a preventive counter-terrorism measure—not any old kind of counter-terrorism measure—yet we know that ID card regimes in Germany, Spain and Turkey did not and could not stop the 9/11 bombers who were based in Hamburg, the Istanbul bombers in 2003, or the Madrid bombers in 2004. Next, it was said that ID cards would stop benefit fraud, yet as we heard earlier from the Home Secretary—persuasively—most benefit fraud involves lying about personal circumstances, not identity. It was then claimed that ID cards would help to tackle illegal immigration, which is an equally spurious reason—it was scarcely credible given that under previous plans, foreign nationals would not need an ID card for the first three months of any stay. Last year the Government changed tack altogether and tried to sell ID cards as a way to help young people to access services. A cost of £30, with a potential fine of £1,000 if they move home or marry and forget to tell Big Brother, is the last thing the average young Briton needs today, which helps to explain the very low take-up. However, in retrospect the most extraordinary thing is the long journey that ID cards have travelled from security panacea to friendly service provider. This is a veritable chameleon of a project that seeks to hide its real nature with every change in presentation. My third reason for supporting the Bill is cost, and we have heard plenty in the debate about the billions of pounds it would cost to maintain and run the scheme. Although the future cost of ID cards was always much higher than the previous Government could ever bring themselves to admit, there is a further point to make: the flawed design and inherent vulnerability of the database to fraud, as attested by expert after expert, represent a massive contingent liability that this Government and the taxpayer should relinquish at the very first opportunity. In sum, ID cards are intrusive, ineffective and ludicrously expensive. This is Labour's great white elephant of a project that has been left lumbering around Whitehall, and Britain can well do without it.