Identity Documents Bill

My Lords, I had not intended to intervene on this amendment, but I will say two things. First, I suspect that a report before Parliament might be an unnecessary expense, but I hope that people will look at the experiences from it and incorporate them into future policies. Having heard what noble Lords have said, there seems to be confusion between nailing down a particular name or body to an identity card, and security. The trouble is that one does not know when someone goes bad. There can be a complete dissociation between issuing a pass to someone and them committing a crime. One has to go on checking whether someone has gone bad. Possession of a particular identity token does not show that someone is okay. On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Brett, a lot of work is going on on the interoperability of identity systems. That is the way forward. There is a body of work going on from EURIM, which is an offshoot of the parliamentary group PITCOM. It is an interesting area. The problem is that different organisations vet people for different purposes. It may be totally safe to entrust someone with the secrets of the country, but you might not want them to babysit your children—and vice versa. I note that the noble Lord is laughing. I am citing extremes here to highlight the fact that someone may be perfectly all right working in airside security, but quite dangerous in a totally different situation. We must be careful not to confuse these things and not to think that possession of a nailed-down identity card or token that shows you have been given a certain name proves that you are okay. That is the underlying problem. We should move forward, looking at the interoperability of identity systems, so that if we have to take engineers from somewhere else, we know whom we can rely on and what it is safe for them to do, and can work out how to get them through quickly. I suspect that the bigger problem is the bureaucracy involved in issuing these things. People think that that is the clever place, but it is not.