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Home Affairs and Communities

As I said about the Home Secretary’s comments on the immigration service working well, if that was sorting out, heaven help us from something that goes wrong. The Home Secretary’s letter also states how the Government successfully handled the fingerprint system. He has forgotten that that also broke down only three or four months ago, so police forces throughout the country could not get fingerprints identified for about two or three weeks. Such systems are intrinsically difficult to run and his Department is not very good at running them. I shall cite one further example to the House, which was dealt with by Mr. Bichard under the Home Secretary’s predecessor. We all remember Soham. The backdrop to Soham was the Home Office’s inability to get an IT system working throughout the country for all our police forces. On the basis of that fact, the Home Secretary has not made a good case that the Home Office could run the ID system. The letter says that ID cards must be the most cost-effective way of tackling the problems that they seek to address. The central point of that short paragraph is that the cost of the scheme would be recovered from charges to card applicants—so it does not matter, sir. The cost will not be on the Home Office budget because the 83 or 160 quid—whatever the cost—will be met by ordinary citizens when they pay for their passports, driving licences and other documents. The Home Secretary makes no attempt to respond to suggestions that the scheme might cost between £10 billion and £20 billion. I would not care to guess how many border guards we could get, how many new systems to prevent welfare fraud we could introduce, or how much we could do on counter-terrorism for £10 billion or £20 billion. However, the matter certainly has not been addressed in the letter. The letter says that ID cards must not pose a threat to civil liberties. I shall be fair to the Home Secretary, because he has at least made one attempt in that respect. We complained when it was suggested that someone outside the civil service would get a 10-year sentence for misusing the data, while someone inside the civil service would get only two years, so I think that was corrected. He has made some minor attempts to deal with the threat to civil liberties, but there is an intrinsic weakness in the proposal, which gives rise to the civil liberty problem. It came up when I was trying to reach a conclusion as to how to deal with the matter before Second Reading. I went to see a number of senior policemen. Every one of them supported the Home Secretary’s view on ID cards, so I asked them a simple question: what would they do to stop someone using one of the 20,000 access points to the database to put in a programme, commonly known as a virus? Let us say, for the sake of argument, that such a virus would make my biometrics, if they were interrogated, lead to the answer ““yes”” to any identity, so I could claim to be Charles Clarke, Michael Howard, Tony Blair or whoever, and the database would say yes every time. [Interruption.] There are already two David Davises. Those were very intelligent men—heads of police forces and so on, some of the most senior policemen in the country. None of them had an answer, and I have not yet heard an answer to the question how we will stop tampering with the IT system that will be at the centre of the scheme. That is much more important than the little bit of plastic. The database at the centre is what brings about a change in the relationship between the individual and the state. The Government have no answer as to how they will protect that database. The Home Secretary’s only answer to the problem was, ““Other people are doing the same thing.”” That is a pretty weak answer on a matter of such importance.