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Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 6:"Page 2, line 6, leave out ““securing the efficient and effective provision of”” and insert ““preventing illegal or fraudulent access to””" The noble Baroness said: My Lords, the objective of the amendment is to focus on the Government’s failure to meet one of the five reasonable tests which we set out at the beginning of our debates on the Bill. We pointed out that the Government must make clear not only the detail of the specific purposes for which an ID card would be required, but which of those purposes are priorities, otherwise it will be difficult for us to assess them. The Government failed to do that adequately in Committee. Clause 1(4) proposes that the definition of what is necessary in the public interest should encompass anything that is,"““for the purpose of securing the efficient and effective provision of public services””." I would have thought that the efficient and effective provision of public services embraces the totality of government’s duty in the area of public services. This paragraph is framed so widely that it would enable identity cards to be required in accessing literally any public service, so long as the Government claimed that it was in the interests of efficiency. It is the ultimate catch-all paragraph and, as such, it is entirely unsuitable to governing a Bill whose provisions have such a fundamental effect on the relations between the state and the citizen. Under it, everything from a registration of a birth to a registration of a death, from the arrival at the gates of a nursery to collecting a pension, could be made dependent on being registered. As the Minister made clear in the careful letter which she kindly sent to noble Lords last week, the paragraph covers everything under full compulsion, including being able to access a vast array of free health services. In that way, within 10 years or so on the Government’s current planning, an audit trail of the daily lives of every citizen could be built up. That is a giant step indeed. It should be one of the last steps that we take, when all the legitimate doubts about the costs, efficacy, security and scope of the scheme have been set to rest—if, as I doubt from hearing earlier debates, they can ever be set to rest. It should certainly not be one of the first steps. We should not permit the Government to do everything they wish in the name of efficiency. We should not simply leave the matter to regulations; it would be far better to set out limits in the Bill. Amendment No. 6 tries to offer a solution. It creates the active purpose of policing crime and fraud in Clause 1(4)(e); that is, something much more limited and definable than a general purpose of being ““efficient””. We agree with the Government that citizens of this country would see any attack on the fraudulent access to services as being a useful step. There are more efficient ways of doing that than this Bill, but that is an argument for Second Reading and Committee, not for today. Surely, if the Government’s method has any justification at all, it cannot be the creation and maintenance of a vast audit trail, but the specific purpose of preventing illegal and fraudulent access to services, which is, after all, what the Government originally told us this Bill would be all about when we started this process some considerable time ago. If the purpose of the scheme were not the general management provision in subsection 4(a), but were the more targeted, and frankly more necessary, purpose that I propose, we would end up designing an entirely different system. I suspect that it would be cheaper, more effective and more efficient than the one before us today. The register and ID cards risk becoming an end in themselves and not a solution. It is important to put this more careful definition in the Bill. I beg to move.