Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 5:"After Clause 2, insert the following new clause—" ““SAFEGUARDING CORE INFORMATION Correspondence, electronic or otherwise, is prohibited between the National Identity Register and any CORE scheme.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am sure that noble Lords will remember the recent passage of the Identity Cards Bill. The purpose of this amendment is clear. It will ensure that the identity cards register, so eloquently opposed in this House and in another place by noble and right honourable friends, would not be able to correspond or communicate with the online record of electors. I am sure that some noble Lords will have followed the ID cards debate and the following questions carefully. They may therefore be surprised that I have tabled this amendment at all. On 13 February, the Government stated in a Written Answer in another place:"““There is currently no proposal for these specifications to provide for two-way data-sharing with the proposed identity cards register””.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/2/06; col. 1595W.]" However, on 18 April, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, announced on behalf of his right honourable friend Des Browne that data from the national identity register will also be used,"““as an adult population register . . . this should be implemented through the identity cards scheme on the basis that the scheme eventually becomes compulsory””.—[Official Report, 18/4/06; col. WS 134.]" It is my understanding that it is not currently compulsory to hold an ID card and that that provision will only apply after 2009—let us not forget that from 1 January 2009 it will be compulsory to be on the register. We wonder what other plans the Government have for the ID cards scheme. We learnt from the Sunday Times on 23 April that Ministers in the Home Office were considering the use of ID cards to keep health records on such things as blood groups, allergies and donor status. I understand that the Minister, Andy Burnham, does not consider that HIV and AIDS victims need to state their status at this stage. It seems that pledges from the Government on the information to be included on or excluded from the register come with a time limit. I remain anxious about the safety and the sensitivity of information that will be kept on CORE. It will contain a record of where one is registered to vote, and it is my understanding that there could also be a record of the marked register of postal votes. I hope that, now that we are to have CORE, once it has been established it will be a success. It would be devastating if it were to fail and adversely affect the democratic process. The potential vulnerabilities of CORE are clear. We had a full and interesting debate on the fraud implications of having an online record of electors. Noble Lords will recall the statistic from the Financial Services Authority, which tells us that fraud is rising by over 300 per cent a year. Despite a long debate in Committee, we have not yet heard from the Minister exactly how the CORE electoral scheme is to be run and what safeguards against fraud will be in place in whatever structure is adopted from the two models that the noble Baroness suggested at that time. Will there be one centrally run scheme for the whole country that takes information from local authorities, or will there be a comparative network between authorities? The consultation period on this ended on 7 March, I believe, and I am sure that the Minister will be able to provide answers to these questions. That is vital information, as each system comes with its own specific vulnerability. A central scheme, once hacked into, would yield up nationwide information. A locally integrated scheme might be easier to infiltrate on a local level, but it would be more difficult to access national information in that way. Will CORE be an electronic version of what exists physically at present or will it do the thinking for the electoral registration officers in matching up data? This amendment is tabled in a protective spirit—not only to protect electoral information on the register, but to prevent links being made between data that could pave the way for compulsory voting or compulsory ownership of an ID card in order to vote. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, to the Identity Cards Bill stood in the way of compulsory ownership of a physical ID card. But it is not difficult to imagine, in a few years, an elector being informed that he is not allowed to vote because he does not possess an ID card. More important, the vulnerability of the combined information on the CORE and the ID registers will pose a serious risk in terms of identity theft and fraud. I hope that the Minister can give an assurance that such connection will be prevented in the interests of data security or that proposals for data sharing will be subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny. It is also my understanding that the Home Office is the only department to produce costings for the identity cards scheme. Can the Minister inform the House, following the consultation, whether CORE and the NIR will link up and, if so, can she give an indication of the costs? In the event of data sharing between CORE and the ID register, which we are all trying to prevent, can the Minister state that the correspondence of information will not be used to penalise individuals in respect of voting if they have failed to keep up to date on the ID register? Would an individual be given notice that the information held on him on either register would be linked up? My noble friend Lord Northesk raised this point eloquently in the Committee stage of the Identity Cards Bill. He said that,"““one possible reason for the provision””—" that is, to register facts on an individual without his knowledge or consent—"““might be to facilitate the merging of data on to the register from already existing government databases””." My noble friend went on to say that such a linkage would be,"““wholly antipathetic to individual privacy rights””.—[Official Report, 16/11/05; col. 1691.]" What is more, the link between CORE and the NIR would operate immediately after designation of passports. The information to be held on all these systems is highly sensitive. We have learnt that the NIR, the system for passports, can include not only biometric data but also health records. We need an assurance that there will not be a link-up between these systems and, in particular, that CORE will not be able to be interrogated on behalf of the other systems. I beg to move.