Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I can deal with it very simply. I am the first and last to acknowledge the primacy of the other House. I would never challenge it for a second. But here we are dealing with an exceptional case in which this House is seeking to uphold the manifesto of the Government, and that is the truth of it. I shall continue if I may. What would the poor voter be supposed to do, confronted with a Bill, which, as we said, came before the other place and this place before the manifesto, which says one thing, and the later manifesto, which says another? It is perfectly clear that the manifesto is what counts when the electorate go to the polls. It will not do for the Government to argue otherwise, in particular, because the Home Secretary is, after all, the embodiment and guardian of law and order, and that in turn depends on the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I sincerely say to the House that the example being set by the Government in this instance is self-damaging—indeed, it damages us all at a time when public trust in politics is already fraying. I say all this with genuine reluctance because I recognise what a hugely difficult job the Home Secretary does and what ability, energy and, in normal circumstances, decency the present incumbent brings to that onerous task. Before I sit down, I need to say a word about the effects of our amendments because they have still apparently not hit home. Mr Clarke’s first argument on Monday, and we heard it again this afternoon, was that unless, as he put it, the processes of taking out a passport and taking out an ID card were merged—that was his word—citizens would be deprived of what he called,"““the statutory safeguards provided by the Bill, such as the creation of a national identity scheme commissioner””." The answer to that is simple. If you believe that there are extra safeguards by having an ID card, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness said last week, you will no doubt take out your voluntary ID card. That is fine. That is up to each of us to decide. It is also for us to decide whether or not we better protect our identity against fraud by having an ID card. Again, voluntarism is best: first, because there is considerable disagreement as to whether the ID card will do that—I refer to the honey-pot risk; and, secondly, because the overhanging and perhaps dominant issue in the general debate is whether we should be forced to hand over to the state the mass of Schedule 1 information that will create the database standing behind every card, as Tony McNulty, the Minister, put it on 13 February. Here, again, I am afraid that misleading statements have been made, most recently on Monday, when the Home Secretary said:"““The same data will be held in both cases””.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/06; col. 1250.]—" referring, of course, to ID cards on the one hand and passports on the other. The noble Baroness gave a comparable impression to that in our debate on 6 March, although she has not done so today. For a passport, you need give only your present principal address, compared with the prospect for ID cards under Clause 1 of providing not only all your addresses in the UK and abroad, but the time you have spent at each of those addresses—back without limit. Your file at the ID registry will also contain 13 categories of personal reference numbers, compared with one or none for the passport, plus your record, registration and ID card history, validation information, security information, and, above all, your intimate audit trail information. None of that is needed for a passport. Why do the Government continue to pretend otherwise? Add to that the danger of future pressure to add to the list of required data and the managerial imperative—the economic rationalisation—favouring merger of all state information on to the ID register. The information commissioner was surely right to deliver his sombre warning last October. Like the noble Baroness, I do not propose to repeat the general arguments that I and many others of your Lordships deployed on 6 March, and earlier, in support of the Motion. Suffice it to say that this uniquely complex centralised scheme is ill-thought through, incompletely costed, hugely costly, technologically risky and corruptible both internally and externally. Furthermore, the ambitious claims made for it have steadily lost weight as they have been subjected to detailed scrutiny in this place and beyond it. A compulsory scheme will add to what has become, I am sad to say, a surveillance state of unparalleled reach among democracies. What is more, the majority of our EU partners either have no cards or voluntary ID cards. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, picked out Sweden, Finland and Denmark at the end of her speech last week to support her case, and said that they were ““hardly totalitarian states””. How true, but let us consider the facts. Sweden introduced a simple national ID card on 1 October last year, but it is voluntary. Finland has a simple and voluntary card. Denmark does not have an ID card at all. Our Motion would allow those who favour cards, for whatever reason, to have them voluntarily without the compulsion of the Government’s proposals. Very many would have cards; very many would not. I received a message when I arrived this afternoon from a woman who said that she represented a large number of embattled and battered women. She said, ““For goodness sake, don’t let them have compulsory cards because the register will be fallible and we will be vulnerable””. Over time, compulsion is likely to have a profoundly damaging impact on that trust and allegiance of the citizen towards the state and its organs without which our most cherished hopes and, indeed, the stated aims of the Government in this Bill, cannot be realised. We and the Conservatives have abandoned the other several votes that were taken and won in this House during the Bill’s passage. This is not conceivably a wrecking amendment, but a saving one. I beg to move. Moved, as an amendment to Motion A, leave out from ““House”” to end and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 16 and 22, and do disagree with the Commons Amendment No. 22C in lieu””.—(Lord Phillips of Sudbury.)