Identity Documents Bill

I am not talking entirely about compensation: I am talking about the issue of scrapping the card and not continuing at all. The amendment deals with it continuing as a travel document in Europe. The individuals concerned bought a card from the Government: not from a Labour Government or a Conservative Government, but from the Government. To those individuals, it is still the Government who are now withdrawing them. Until now, we have not had a culture in which it is acceptable for an arrangement entered into with the Government by an individual for a service in return for a payment to be totally withdrawn shortly afterwards, but for the payment made by the individual to be retained on the grounds that it is rather less than most people pay for a monthly subscription to Sky. The Minister said at Second Reading that we must have a sense of proportion about this. She should address that comment to herself. Accepting these amendments would be one way for the Government to show a sense of proportion. Perhaps the Minister will tell us whether the same approach as that being shown to individuals with ID cards is being adopted for contractors who have been working for the Government on developing and running the ID card scheme. Have they, too, been told that they should have known that the scheme would no longer continue if there was a change in the political colour of the Government at the election and that, knowing this, they should not have entered into any contracts; and accordingly that no further payments are being made to them and the terms of any contracts are null and void, with no compensation payable? I do not think so. For this Government, there appears to be one rule for their dealings with those who can fight their corner, such as the large contractors and their owners and shareholders, and another rule for their dealings with individual citizens who do not have the resources or muscle to stand up to what some would regard as sharp practice. The impact assessment refers to the cost of termination of contracts with contractors, and the cost of the refund process. If there are to be no refunds—which is why we are tabling an amendment suggesting that the cards should continue as travel documents in Europe—what refund process is being referred to in the impact assessment? How much would it cost? How much compensation has been paid for termination of contracts? Using an ID card as a form of travel document is not an unfamiliar phenomenon in Europe, as my noble friend Lord Brett explained. The identity cards of Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania, Greece, Slovakia and Sweden are all recognised by all EU members as valid for intra-EU travel. The argument that border agencies would be flummoxed by individuals using our ID cards for travel is not very convincing. Neither, incidentally, do there appear to have been problems with recognition of the limited number of identity cards issued here so far. As my noble friend Lord Brett explained, this is a facilitating amendment to enable the continued use of ID cards for travel purposes. We support the amendment. It is sensible—as is Amendment 4, to which the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, is a signatory. If the national identity register is to be destroyed, it makes sense to transfer data relevant to passports and international travel to the passport database and to the Identity and Passport Service. After all, the IPS is used to handling such information. Practically, such a transfer would not be hard to achieve. Transfer would require the permission of those individuals whose data are held, but these would not be difficult to obtain where, as is likely in most cases, the individual is willing to agree. That is because, on data transfer, the appropriate section of the Data Protection Act 1998 states: "““Personal data shall be obtained for only one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes””." We do not see that what we are suggesting with this amendment falls foul of that criterion. We would argue that there are wider merits in such a transfer with regard to the future development of the British passport. Destroying all the data on the national identity register adversely affects the UK’s progress towards biometric passports of a standard comparable to the rest of the EU, America and an increasing number of countries around the world. Will the Government’s decision to scrap the NIR and halt the development of the British passport leave British citizens out of step with the rest of the world? We fear that the answer is yes. The British passport is one of the most respected documents in the world, but the Government’s policy looks like it will put this at risk. At Second Reading the noble Baroness expressed the Government’s view that it is not necessary for the security of the British passport to progress to second-generation biometric data in these documents, a view that stands in contrast—