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Identity Cards Bill

Someone with substantial parliamentary experience knows that the best way to ensure that such things are dealt with is to fire a shot, not just across the bows but below the water line, in the amendments. That would ensure that these matters would not be ignored, as has been the case in the past year. However, the House is being asked to vote for a pig in a poke and accept something that cannot possibly be quantified. The three issues that the right hon. Gentleman identified make it impossible to give any valid estimate of the costs of the ID card scheme. In an intervention from elsewhere on the Labour Benches, we were told—I paraphrase—that the Minister had assured us that the cost would be kept as low as possible. Those of us who remember the poll tax debates in the House know that no Minister said, ““We’re going to make the poll tax as high as possible””—on the contrary, the Government said it would be 50 quid or 100 quid and would be kept as low as possible. They said it would transform local government finance, but of course they could not estimate the cost of the poll tax because they could not estimate the cost of enforcement. In the famous phrase of Michael Heseltine, it was unenforceable—unworkable. That is exactly what we are facing once again. The three issues that the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen so ably identified in his speech in favour of the Bill should reinforce substantially the opposition to it and our doubts about it. There are two other cost issues that we must bear in mind. The first was raised in an earlier debate, when we heard a quote from Mr. Jerry Fishenden, the national technology officer for Microsoft, from The Scotsman this morning. As a high ranking official of Microsoft, he is presumably in a reasonable position to estimate the damage that the Bill could cause if it were not correctly handled. He said that it would lead to a massive fraud"““on a scale as yet unseen.””" If that comes about, it will be a cost on general business and on security, and measures will have to be introduced to counteract the massive fraud"““on a scale as yet unseen””—" again, totally unquantifiable by the Government. Lastly, there is the question of opportunity cost—of what we might be doing with the billions if we were not pursuing this pig in a poke or buying these unfinished goods, this spatchcock legislation. I suppose the Government might fight another war. That would be another £5 billion—