Identity Documents Bill

No, but even if we are not, I am still fascinated to know how many of us did. I will be quite frank—I did not even read my own party’s manifesto. It was 115 pages long, for a start. However, even if we assume that people had read the party manifesto and knew that we were committed to a repeal of the scheme, there was nothing in any manifesto about repayment of the fee. Anybody reading it would, I suspect, have assumed that if the Government were going to do that, they would return the £30 that was laid out for the purchase. That is my first point. Secondly, in the statement of the deputy director of policy of the Identity and Passport Service, which is annexed to the report of the Joint Committee on the Bill—it was a pre-scrutiny report published in the middle of October—it was made clear that although all cardholders had been warned that the cards would be made null and void by the passage of the Bill, there was no reference to non-repayment of the fee. It is very simple: if you knew about all of this—and the vast majority of the public did not—there was still nothing about repayment of the fee. Then we come to the argument which is to be found at page 20 of the Joint Committee report: "““Comment has been raised that the absence of a refund provision in the Bill is denying cardholders access to safeguards set out in consumer protection legislation. However, an ID card would not be considered as a consumer good. That is because the issue and the holding of an ID card are not considered to be in the nature of a consumer transaction and a sale of goods””." That, again, comes from the deputy director of policy at the Identity and Passport Service. That is his view. As a lawyer, I am extremely dubious about the reasoning. It seems to me that there was a sale and purchase of goods, namely a card; I do not see any reason why this should be taken out of the normal consumer protection legislation. Even if it is, surely it is bizarre for this Government, who are committed to fairness—and I am passionately committed to fairness—to resile from the general standard that prevails by law between consumers and suppliers, between purchasers and sellers, on the basis that there is no strictly narrow legal requirement under legislation to do so. Surely we should be a model and satisfy the spirit of all that consumer protection legislation. I am sorry to have gone on, but it strikes me that this is an own goal. It may be small in financial terms—£360,000 is scarcely a blink of the Treasury eyelid these days—but not in terms of the message that it sends out. I want this coalition Government to walk their talk and to act fair as well as talk fair.