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Home Affairs and Communities

When I responded earlier about the possibility of some compromise, I talked about putting into law the Crown Prosecution Service method. That was in mind of some extremist parties’ behaviour and in dealing with them. Beyond that, I do not see a way of doing what the Government are trying to do that would preserve the rights and freedoms of British people of all creeds and cults. In term of things that are difficult to make judgments on, we come to ID cards. I suppose that it is a subject of importance sacrificed for little or no gain, given the proposals. We have been here before. When the Government last brought their proposals before the House, we set a number of tests. The Home Secretary seems to think that they are fig leaves. Is purpose a fig leaf? I understand that, with this Government, purpose may be a fig leaf. There is a potential cost of £10 billion or £20 billion. Is that a fig leaf? Really. Are the fundamental rights and privacies of British citizens a fig leaf? The Home Secretary’s Department has the most unmitigated record of wreckage of IT projects in modern history. Is that a fig leaf? The Home Secretary is unlucky because, as a Public Accounts Committee Chairman, I watched the Home Office for four years, and the right hon. Gentleman is about to hear some of the lessons that I learned. Let us start with the summary points. The points of the tests were to establish the balance or imbalance between serious principles—principles that the right hon. Gentleman agreed mattered—and the competence or incompetence of the proposal before us. It seems that the Government are asking Parliament to make a decision on a scheme that they have still not yet properly worked out themselves. The scheme is so ill thought out that it is by no means clear that the technology will be foolproof or that the costs will be controllable. Furthermore, it is not clear that the Home Office could manage the scheme. We must remember that if we depend on the scheme for our security and it fails or is subverted, we are far worse off than we were without it.