UK Parliament / Open data

Crime

Proceeding contribution from Lord Marlesford (Conservative) in the House of Lords on Thursday, 20 March 2008. It occurred during Debate on Crime.
My Lords, as the long years of this Labour Government draw to a close—I say at once that they are a Labour Government who have been a huge improvement on previous Labour Administrations for the simple reason that they have transformed themselves philosophically from old Labour to new Labour—I fear that the reputation of the Government for competence as the legacy for which they will be remembered is rapidly fading. There is an increasing apparent lack of political control over the bureaucracy, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Home Office. It has always been a difficult department to direct and control because it is very inward-looking and does not respond kindly to anyone else’s ideas. The great acronym, NIH—““not invented here””—is one which motivates it very strongly. I remembered that acronym when I introduced and secured an amendment to the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 to set up a national register of firearms which could be accessed by any police force, as has happened for many years with driving licences. There was endless resistance from Home Office officials who were able to fight a successful battle against it until November 2007, when finally the scheme came into force. I am grateful not so much to the Home Office, but to a succession of Home Office Ministers who fought with me and my party, and with the Liberal Democrats who were very helpful on this issue. The real problem is that Home Office Ministers tend to survive in inverse proportion to their effectiveness. We have had an awful lot of Home Secretaries. We had Mr Straw for four years; I think that he was rather good and I am glad that he is now in charge of the other half of the Home Office. On balance, the split of the Home Office has been a good idea. We then had Mr Blunkett for two and a half years. He had many of the right instincts and there was much affection and admiration for him. We had Mr Clarke for a year and a half, and it was rather sad that his career came to an end. The best Home Secretary by one measure was Mr John Reid, who was the first to come out with the profound truth that the Home Office is not for purpose. Others had realised and recognised this but there had not previously been a Secretary of State who had said it. I am a great fan of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord West, because I am a great fan of Britain’s Armed Forces and you do not become the First Sea Lord unless you are pretty good. The odds against most Members of the House of Commons reaching that level are rather high, especially nowadays. I always remember Ernest Marples, for whom I worked when I was very young—he was a most effective Minister and a true visionary in that he recognised the scope for applying technology in government long before others—saying that any Prime Minister faced a real problem in having to fill nearly 100 ministerial posts from a short list of about 350 who had been primarily selected for their pastoral inclinations rather than their executive talents. Yesterday we had a White Paper on national security. I have not yet had time carefully to study it, but I have looked at it. Frankly, I am not very impressed. I think it is a somewhat bogus document. When you are trying to focus effort and get results, you cannot usefully put in one document all these different headings—terrorism, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, trans organised crime, global instability, failed and fragile states, civil emergencies, drivers of insecurity—I am not sure what that means—challenges to the rule-based international system, which is a little obscure, competition for energy, climate change—which of course had to be in it; it has to be in everything—poverty, inequality, poor governance and so on. I wondered why it had been produced and I thought that perhaps it was meant to balance our Prime Minister’s obsession with plastic bags. Think of a Prime Minister under pressure who is lucky enough to be given the chance of writing an article in the Daily Mail, which has a huge readership of those who are not his natural supporters. What does he write about? He writes about plastic bags. I want to refer to two specific matters which are the responsibility of the Home Office and the particular responsibility of the noble Lord, Lord West. The first matter is identity cards and the second is border control. I have received many helpful Answers to Written Questions over several months which have raised certain specific questions. Dealing first with what I see to be the primary problem with identity cards, the Government have made a major conceptual error and focused on the card. I support the concept of identity cards but they have focused on the card, which is a rather inflammatory thing anyway. What matters is that there should be a register so that the Government know who people are. A card which has on it biometrics is not sensible for a simple reason: if you are a serious criminal or terrorist you will ensure that the biometric details on the card match your own. You may say that a chip is not easy to forge—and many people would find it hard to forge one—but seriously bad people would be able to do so. Of course you want biometrics, but you want them in a central record which can be accessed online. There is no advantage in accessing the data on a card. It would be a great deal cheaper if people were to carry a card with a photo; I would have no objection to that. But the crucial thing is the number and that that number is linkable to a central record which authorised people can check and quickly find information. With modern data links, it would be every bit as rapid as it is for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, which works extremely well and has done for many years. It would be a great deal cheaper to have cards that did not have on them these biometric chips. Biometrics are going to be a proper answer to identification, and growingly so. I have no objection to my fingerprints or DNA being held anywhere. The technology exists to ensure that central records can be firewalled—I am assuming a level of competence for the purpose of this argument—and the different data bases can be separated from each other. So instead of us all having a multiplicity of numbers—passport numbers, driving licence numbers, tax numbers, national insurance numbers, which are about the most insecure of all of them, national health numbers and so on—one number would be quite sufficient and you should get a net cost saving. I have said much of this before but I have been unable to persuade the Home Office. However, that failure does not necessarily convince me that I am wrong. I think it would be a great deal cheaper and more efficient to have a central register of people with merely a card as the first thing to prove identity. Moving on to the crucial issue of border control, the United Kingdom is not a member of Schengen and I think we are right not to be. But the premise on which we are not a member of Schengen is that, because of our geographical design, it is easier for us to defend and protect our own borders without being in Schengen. The Schengen borders, by definition, are not points at which people can be checked. But this argument, which I support, is undermined by the fact that our borders are not properly controlled. Before the British left Hong Kong in 1997, there was there full electronic border control which worked extremely well. That was 11 years ago now. But we still do not have it in Britain. When you have your passport swiped as you come into Britain, the officials are checking to see whether you are on the watch list, on which there are about a million people. It is quite useful. But there is no record kept that you have arrived—if you are not on the watch list you walk straight through—and, therefore, if you allow a certain number of people to come into the country for a limited length of time, there is no way of knowing that they have left. Amazingly, no record is made of people’s departures. If you do not have a record of someone departing, the chances are you do not know whether or not they have. And if they are meant to depart by a certain date, that does not seem to be a very sensible system. The e-borders system of control is not expected to come into full force until 2013. We had a wake-up call on this with 9/11 in 2001. There has been plenty of time to get it right and it is not acceptable that our e-borders control will not be introduced until 2013-14, when it will be complete. I ask the Government to make a new attempt to bring this forward much more rapidly. I come now to the question of passports. Around 250,000 passports are reported lost or stolen every year in the UK. The cost of checking to make sure that they have been lost or stolen is considerable, and I have no reason to think that the agency concerned does not do that quite carefully. However, the charge made for a lost or stolen passport is exactly the same as the cost for getting a new one. It ought to be a lot higher, if only as a great deterrent against losing a passport. When I put that to the Home Office, the answer was, ““Oh, it wouldn’t be fair if you had looked after your passport and you lost it and then you had to pay more for a new one””. That is in one of the Written Answers. I could say the same if I am silly enough to leave my suitcase in a train—but you insure your suitcase. A passport is just as insurable as anything else. If the Government had proper fees for replacing lost or stolen passports, not only would that be a deterrent but it would give the Home Office some extra money that it very much needs at the moment. I thank my noble friend Lady Trumpington for giving me the chance to make these points.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
700 c388-91 
Session
2007-08
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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