Identity Documents Bill

My Lords, I admire the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, for sticking to the old guns, as you might say. It may be worth while in this Second Reading debate reviewing where we have come from because I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, was not accurate in what he said. The principal issue that exercised this House back in 2005-06, to such an extraordinary degree that we threw that Bill back to the Commons three times, was the issue of compulsion. It is wrong of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to start his speech by saying that the previous Government introduced a Bill for a voluntary card. Indeed they did according to their manifesto, but when the Bill came out it was compulsory. That is the rock upon which the opposition in this House was built and that opposition then grew across all Benches. It is as well to remember that. I pay tribute to Mr Willcock. I do not suppose that many in the Chamber remember dear old Mr Willcock who, when asked by a policeman in 1952, refused to produce his identity card. He said, ““I am not going to produce my identity card. The identity card was to stop the Germans, not to help you on some piffling nonsense””. The High Court upheld the good gentleman’s refusal and the identity card legislation was swiftly repealed. The point of that was to show that identity cards tend to have what you might call usage creep. The state cannot resist the opportunity to use the card for more and more things in more and more situations. Again, one aspect of the Bill of 2005 that this House objected to profoundly was the right of the Secretary of State to add to the circumstances in which the identity card could be used and, in particular, to add to the category of information that could be on the national identity register. Let us not forget that the national identity register was to be unique in the world in terms of the amount of information that it would collect on each citizen. Microsoft licked its lips and referred to the register as the great honey-pot because it was to be the greatest source of information on earth. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, objects to what we are doing now because of the commercialisation that he says afflicts disadvantaged youths who want to establish their identity. I would be totally sympathetic to that if I felt that he was correct. However, he omits to remember not only that the ID cards that the Bill will abolish would have been compulsory if this House had not intervened three times but—this could never have been taken away—the huge cost of the scheme, which the LSE working group established would be more than £20 billion over the first 10 years and which was to be recouped by selling the ID cards to the great retailing outlets. These would have readers which, if you spent more than £15 at XYZ store, would read the purchase into the national identity register. Every time that happened, the store would have paid a small sum of money, and—how many of us remember this?—the national identity register would have recorded every occasion on which the card was used. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, looks quizzical, but I assure him that that is so. That is why people objected to the sort of information build-up to which the card would lead.