Identity Cards Bill

It merely confirms that a Government who do not know what they are doing ask a distinguished firm of accountants to produce a report that answers no useful questions and we are no further on. No doubt the public were required to spend several hundreds of thousands of pounds on fees to obtain that rather unhelpful answer. In any event, the end picture is not a happy one for the Government, and it is certainly not a happy one for the taxpayers of this country. May I put to the Minister a point with which he did not seem to want to get to grips? The letter that he wrote on 7 February was sent only to his own colleagues and is written on House of Commons writing paper. It is interesting that it could not go out on Home Office paper—first, because I do not imagine that the Home Office civil servants would have put their name to such a letter or allowed it to go out from their Department; and secondly, because it contains a statement that is, to put it at its lowest, highly disputable and that illustrates the Government’s conduct of this debate. The Minister says in the letter to his hon. Friends: "““The LSE also allocated an inflated £1 billion marketing budget and assumed a much higher loss/theft rate than is the case for existing documents.””" The Minister either knows, or has failed to pick up the fact, that on at least three occasions the authors of the LSE report have made it clear to the Government that they made no such assumption and that they included no such figure in their report. If we were outside Parliament and if, for example, we were considering the concept of express malice in a defamation action, that letter would be evidence of it. As we are here, it does not apply.