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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, well knows, I have always been in favour of the concept of a national identity register, for the reasons that I set out at Second Reading. I am not in favour of cards. I regard them as a provocative, expensive complication, but I shall not go into that now. The reason that I support the amendment so strongly is that the wholly spurious, commercial arguments which the Home Office has put forward for denying Parliament the necessary information underwrite its incompetence to administer this project. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, will know, we shall be debating later this week another, much smaller Home Office computer project, which is the attempt to put all the police’s firearms records on to a central register. That was required by an Act of Parliament in 1997. That it still has not happened is what we will be looking at on Thursday afternoon. I remind the House that the late, lamented Lord Williams of Mostyn estimated in February 1999 the cost of that important but much smaller project to be £300,000 to £500,000. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, updated that estimate in November last year by saying that the Home Office has already spent £5.6 million and the project has not yet been completed. We simply cannot give to the Home Office a blank cheque.