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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, as a Cross-Bencher, maybe I can assist the noble Lord, Lord Soley. We have now reached a stage where amendments are pushed. The Government have not listened to the arguments about costs. Whatever the noble Lord thinks about it, it is House of Lords procedure that, at this point, you would push an amendment to its limit to find out what the opinion of the House is. The fact that is has been debated before does not mean that it is not right now to test the opinion of the House, which I am sure is going to happen. It is not just political point-scoring. In fact, that is why, at this stage, speeches should stick to the amendment and not wander off into other areas. By and large, most people have stuck to that. I am quickly going to do exactly that. There is nothing new in the arguments being put right now, but the problem is that the Government have not listened and come back with anything. Every benefit has a cost. I think everyone knows that. In normal business and in running the country, one needs to do a cost-benefit analysis. It is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money if it costs you much more to do something than the benefit you get from it, if there are other, better, ways of doing it. For instance, I fully support a biometric passport which is about to be issued under the e-borders scheme. It will have international standard biometrics buried in it, will let you cross borders more easily and will get you through airports and other places more quickly. That is a good idea. Something we should be worried about, however—everything everyone has said on this has been quite right—in addition to the things that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has said about his passport and other things, is that in order to deliver the benefits listed in Clause 1—for instance,"““for the purposes of the protection or detection of crime””—" this system will have to interface with the police national computer. Alternatively, an index to the police national computer is needed; the national identity register is not. The costs and benefits for that need to be worked out. It may be cheaper to store everyone’s fingerprints on the police national computer, with an index into it, because no criminal information is allowed to be stored on the national identity register. Again, that cost-benefit analysis should be done. Immigration controls are enforced with the IND computer. Biometric stuff is issued to new arrivals, and they are biometrically checked if they reapply when they come in. If the IND computer is to interface, for the purposes of the Bill, with the national identity register, then those costs and benefits should be weighed up and put before Parliament before we go into this expensive exercise. If you want to enforce prohibitions on unauthorised working, that information is held on the WPUK computer, which used to be owned by the DHSS—the DWP—and is now owned by the Home Office. That is the work permits UK computer system. It may be cheaper to have an index straight into that. You need to do the cost benefit analysis. I shall not bore the House with the address issue now because I shall bring it up when we get to it, but the system must interface to verify addresses with what would have been—had it not fallen by the wayside about two or three months ago—the national spatial and address infrastructure effort, to bring together the postal address database. Not everyone lives at postal addresses. Many things are used to identify OWPAs—objects without postal address. You get them off the Ordnance Survey or various other things, which I shall talk about later. That will have to be sorted out first, and there will be copyright problems. It is technically possible. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, when he says that, and the people who have put it forward. But the amount of change management and the operation involved for the individual departments that are not Home Office-controlled to get the true benefits is enormous. Until that is sorted out we should not be going forward, blowing an awful lot of taxpayers’ money on something that could be pie in the sky. Blue-skies thinking is fine for universities, but it is not the right thing to do with central government money. I do not want to bore the House, but before sitting down I shall refer to schemes such as federated identity—it is becoming much more popular and is much more an establishment thought—which allows the citizen control of his identity, and still enables delivery of central government services for the purpose of securing efficient and effective provision of public services. That can be done with a federated ID scheme quite happily. But I am not sure that the Bill would enable that to be implemented should a cost benefit analysis show it as the best way forward. I am trying to work on later amendments in case, three years down the road, we decide to go that way instead of using the national identity register. The cheapest is not always the best, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, said. We have to consider the whole life costs and the costs of support later on. We must be very careful about the temporary process. There are little things to consider. I worked with smart cards 10 or 12 years ago. A letter from the Home Office states that,"““a ten year card life is possible””." It may be with new cards; I do not know. When that letter compares Hong Kong and Spain, I realise that the Home Office has missed the point. The problem with cards in general is that in this country we get icy windscreens in winter. The thing nearest to hand for many is a plastic card. A credit card is useful because people can get goods and services with it. An ID card will not be very useful so, in preference in future, people will use their ID card to wipe their windscreens. Unfortunately chips pop out and delaminate.