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Home Affairs and Communities

I am having a recognition problem with somebody’s identity. I reiterate the point. If the proposed system is built as a centrepiece of our security and it fails, we are far worse off than we were when we started. I have had a written intervention from the Home Secretary, which came this morning about an hour or two before business started. The right hon. Gentleman sent me a letter. Given his opening, it was quite surprising that he started ““Dear David””. He attempts to go through the tests:"““Legislation must clearly define the purpose of the cards.””" He gives me a list, which he could have taken from my opening speech—no priority, no costing and no quantitative achievement. It is just a list. The right hon. Gentleman then goes on with whether the technology is sufficiently well developed and robust. His opening sentence reads:"““The Identity Cards Bill is enabling legislation””," which is to miss the point. That is because the Bill proposes to change the relationship between the British citizen and his or her Government. It is a massively important constitutional Bill; no one should be under any misapprehension about that. The point is that unless the technology works, frankly we do not want to touch it at all. However, the Home Secretary wants to introduce the Bill before he knows whether the technology will work. Since it will not work for eight years, one must ask, ““Why the rush?”” The Home Secretary’s letter goes on to talk about the biometric technology and how the chief scientist will examine it. I do not know about other hon. Members, but I have received several letters from experts in this area, especially experts on biometrics, expressing extreme doubts about the viability and reliability of the technology, and the possible levels of errors, false positives, false negatives and other problems associated with it. However, as I shall explain in a minute, even if the biometrics work perfectly, there are fundamental flaws in the proposal. The Home Secretary’s letter goes on to discuss whether the Home Office is capable of delivering such a major information technology project. He talks about how the Government use IT in all sorts of ways. The examples that he gives are informative. First, on pensions, I do not know whether many hon. Members have had problems over the past few weeks with the new card-and-chip system for pensioners, but I have. I have constituents who have not received their pension for five or six weeks as a result of the wonderful system that has been introduced—not by the Home Office on this occasion, but by a more competent Department. The letter goes on to cite passports. I do not know whether anyone remembers the pictures of the queues round the block of people who were desperate to get their passports to go on holiday. On one occasion, I even had a member of the private office of one Home Office Minister go to get one of my constituent’s passports from the heaps of boxes in Lunar house so that she could go to her own marriage in Malaysia the next week. It was one of the most unmitigated IT disasters of modern times and was run by—guess who—the Home Office.