Identity Cards Bill

I welcome the Government’s agreement with amendment (a). However, my problem is that large amounts of public money will be spent before we reach the inevitable point at which we have to call a halt to the terrible monster. I am more sceptical than my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) about the Government’s figures. Their precision is incredible—£584 million, not £583 million or £585 million. At least the London School of Economics gave a range of estimates. The Under-Secretary did not make it clear in reply to my interventions whether the figure included set-up costs. However, we have information about current expenditure from the United Kingdom Passport Service website. I also obtained information through parliamentary questions and from letters from the Under-Secretary. We therefore know that the cost of running the old-style passports was £219 million in 2004–05 and that the charge to people who wanted a passport was £35.60. This year, we commence the introduction of biometric passports, which will include only the facial biometric—a digital image. Yet it will cost the Government £397 million a year and people who purchase the passports will have to pay at least £57.93, which, according to the Government, is the cost of producing the passports. In getting from old-style passports to the first phase of the biometric passport, which includes only one image, the running costs will increase by £178 million a year. Those figures are probably reliable. However, the jump from the new passport with one digital biometric to the all-singing, all-dancing biometric passport/ID card system database is supposed to entail an increase of a mere £187 million. I cannot believe those figures. I cannot believe that it costs £178 million a year to get from A to B yet it will cost only £187 million a year to get from B to C. That does not include the £93 that will have to paid. Apparently, 70 per cent. of it is attributable to the passport, working out at approximately £65 for the passport element.I cannot believe that a passport that contains two fingerprint biometrics as well as the facial biometric will be so cheap, given that the Government have already said that the cost will exceed £57.93. Furthermore, the £93 that people will pay for the privilege or otherwise of having their details on the national identity register and being forced to have an identity card will not cover the cost of operating and maintaining the verification services. We have had no breakdown of how much of the £584 million that would account for; it is an additional cost. I am cynical about Government computer systems. I recently served on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which conducted a brief inquiry into the Rural Payments Agency’s computer records system. The initial cost of that system was going to be £37.4 million a year, to cover capital and revenue costs. That figure has now risen to £54.3 million—an increase of 50 per cent. If a database of only 100,000 records is costing £50-odd million a year to run, it does not seem sensible that we are going to have to pay only an extra £187 million a year to run a massive database of 100 million records, which will be interrogated and will have an audit trail—never mind the cost of the security. What really frightens me about this scheme is that it will make me feel less secure, rather than more secure. The biometrics will have radio frequency identity chips on them, and people will have a field day intercepting them. So what security are we going to put on to the cards? In America, the biometric passports—which also have just the facial biometric—have radio frequency identity chips so that they can be read without contact. There was a furore there when people realised that anyone could intercept that identity information, and an agreement to allow the scheme to go ahead was reached only because a shield was provided in the cover of each passport to stop the signals being intercepted other than when the cover was opened for the passport to be verified at border controls or for Government purposes. The figures simply do not stack up. They do not compare in any way with the costs of other computer systems, and the proposed system is far more complex than any other that we have seen anywhere in the world. Earlier, the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee quoted from his Committee’s report. I should also like to do so. Paragraph 64 on page 23 states: "““The proposed system is unprecedentedly large and complex. It will contain sensitive personal information on tens of millions of individuals. Any failure will significantly affect the functioning of public and private services and personal and national security. Measures to ensure the integrity of the design, implementation and operation of the system must be built in to every aspect of its development . . . We will make recommendations for addressing this serious weakness later in the report.””" The Committee went on to do so. It had been "““concerned about the closed nature of the procurement process””," and stated that it was essential the process be open. It went on: "““Any potential gains from competing providers providing innovative design solutions are likely to be more than offset by the unanticipated problems that will arise from designs that have not been subject to technical and peer scrutiny.””"