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Identity Cards Bill

On Second Reading, the Government failed miserably to argue for the five stated justifications for the measure. They failed to convince the electorate through the press during the summer and, notwithstanding the truncated nature of today’s debate, they barely touched on the five stated justifications, which are: to tackle terrorism; to fight crime; to cover access to public services; to prohibit unauthorised working, and to enhance immigration control. The key unanswered question is about terrorists who currently come here with fake, forged or stolen identities that are sufficiently robust for them to be allowed access. If they come here in future, such robust false identities will be turned into genuine ones by the allocation of an identity card or other parts of the documentation in the ID suite.The terrorist networks will be disrupted and smashed by additional funding for intelligence, not identity cards in the pockets, purses and wallets of innocent citizens in the UK. Let us consider general crime prevention. Not one hon. Member believes that an identity card will stop a single criminal or deter a single crime unless the Government intend the cards to be mandatory and the police can stop, question and ask to see the card of someone who behaves suspiciously. As I said on Second Reading, the police already have the power to stop someone if they have a reasonable ground for believing that that person is about to commit a crime. If the Government were serious about tackling crime, there would not be plastic cards but thousands of extra police on the streets, protecting normal people from normal crimes in normal communities. That has never been rebutted. On identity theft, the Home Secretary repeated tonight that the cost of identity theft was £1.3 billion. That is the big myth. As The Economist said, the figure includes"““the cost of dealing with immigrants who arrive in Britain with false documents.””" The introduction of identity cards will not stop one person coming in with false papers or save one penny. According to The Economist, the real cost of fraudulent applications and hijacked accounts is only £36.9 million. The Bill is a massive and disproportionate response to that problem. Time is short and I shall therefore skip many points—[Hon. Members: ““Hooray.””]—but not all of them. The Government have failed to argue the case for how they will stop unauthorised working. The gangmasters will flout the rule. Are Ministers expecting every berry field, cockle field and potato farm to have a biometric scanner in the buckie when the casual labour arrives? That is nonsense; it will not happen. I said on Second Reading that the Bill was a bad measure, which would make bad law. A Labour Member said that many Labour Members would rue the day they voted for the measure. They will.