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Identity Cards Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I have often made the kind of speech that he has just made on the subject of modern technology, mobile phones, calculating machines and so on. Of course, he is absolutely right, but that is not what we are talking about. If the noble Lord were to look at the cost of large-scale government IT schemes and the cost of the security involved, he would see that almost exactly the reverse has been true. We have only to look at what is happening at the current time to the hugely important National Health Service scheme to see that the benefits that we are all enjoying as we buy our mobile telephones, our calculators or our TV sets have not come through in the same way. In any case, that does not change our need to have current cost estimates from the Government and to be able to make real comparisons.