Identity Documents Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has just raised a series of issues that are not covered by the amendments in this group, which I will cover when we come to the appropriate amendment. It is important to start our debate in Committee with this group of amendments because they go to the heart of the issues we have to deal with, and we need a debate on the underlying implications of what the opposition Benches are proposing. I owe it to the Committee to explain why, far from being simple, these amendments present a real difficulty. Amendment 1 would remove the current status of the identity card as an identity document and instead it would become a simple plastic version of a passport. I have to say that if that had been the original intention of the identity card, matters might have been a great deal simpler. Instead, the previous Government indicated that ID cards were essential for security, necessary to prevent terrorism and crucial in detecting fraud. At Second Reading during the passage of the Bill in the other place, we were told that cancelling the ID card scheme would cause the end of civilisation as we know it. The current shadow Chancellor and then Home Secretary said at Second Reading of the Bill in the other place: "““All that we want to do is make it easier for banks, GPs and employers to verify someone's identity and thereby make it much more difficult for people to create multiple identities and commit identity fraud. That crime costs our economy £1.2 billion every year and has increased by 20% in the first quarter of this year alone. Combating identity fraud protects the security not just of individuals but of all of us collectively. Drug dealers, people traffickers and terrorists depend on access to false documents””.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/6/10; col. 358.]" We agree with a lot of the sentiments there; the issue is whether ID cards have performed any of those functions. The amendment clearly recognises that the ID card was not that panacea. It is unfortunate that, after spending millions of pounds on a scheme which the public did not want, we now have, in effect, a credit-card-sized version of the passport for travel in Europe. That would be the effect. I want to come back to that in a minute, but I want first to comment on the amendments to transfer the records of ID cardholders from the national identity register to the passport database. There are some problems. Those amendments depend on Amendment 1 being accepted, but the practical issues are these. The passport application and issuing process is governed by a fee structure which provides that the income generated from the fee can be spent only on passports. There is no provision which would allow the passport structure to expend resources, no matter how small, on other areas than passports. The Identity and Passport Service does not hold any other database, so unless the amendments are intended to suggest that a new one be established, it is not clear to me how the transfer of information could occur.