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Identity Cards Bill

I shall speak to amendment No. 19, and with your permission, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall press it to a Division at a later stage. I come to the debate, as always, as a humble seeker of the truth. I am doing everything that I possibly can to ensure the swift and speedy passage of Government legislation, and I am supporting them by trying to ensure that whatever legislation is passed can be properly implemented. The problem on which hon. Members on both sides of the House are currently stumbling is that the Government clearly and correctly said from the beginning that they wanted to ensure that they budgeted for the scheme appropriately and set aside the required sums to introduce such a new mechanism for identifying individuals. They said that those sums should properly cover the costs and be effectively and efficiently spent, which I wholeheartedly support. When there was discussion and consultation on charges for ID cards themselves, the Government honestly said that they wanted to keep any charge to a minimum, yet ensure that it would cover the costs of implementing the scheme. That was why we reached the point in June during which it seemed almost as though negotiations were going on in the Chamber between Labour Back Benchers and Front Benchers about the breakdown of charges between the passport and ID-card elements of the scheme. We were told at that stage that the Home Secretary was looking at trying to keep the charge of the card down to £30. A £30 charge on top of the charge for a passport—that takes the charge to £93—might well be reasonable for some people, but the figure is based on the Government’s estimate of the costs of the scheme. The charge is designed to cover the costs, but what will happen if the costs have been underestimated? The Government estimated that the passport and ID scheme would cost £5.8 billion over 10 years, which was the basis on which we calculated a charge of £93. I must say that I could spend £5.8 billion on many more productive things than an ID card scheme, but let us put that principled argument on one side. The London School of Economics report that analysed the scheme, which has already been cited, gave its lowest estimate of the cost of the scheme as £10.6 billion. The median estimate was £14.5 billion and the highest estimate was £19.2 billion. If the Government wish to cover the cost of the scheme through charging, a cost that is anywhere near the LSE’s predictions will mean that the charge for a card and passport will eventually rise to something like £200 to £300.