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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. I hear exactly what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, says: the Government’s scheme would not be his best choice, as he would go for a federated scheme which would find a different way of doing things. But we are where we are, and what I am trying to do is, exactly as he perceives, to create a more transparent system, which, if the Bill goes through unaltered, will work slightly better than the one we have now. The Minister says that I should still my beating heart and that I am not to worry because we are already in a surveillance society, with CCTV cameras and so on; she says, ““Let’s just put it all together and make it easy for the Government to have complete control and you don’t need to worry any more””. The trouble is that I do worry. What the Government propose is more than a straightforward register; it is the audit trail that concerns me. The Minister says that nothing would be put on the audit trail that is not already there; it is simply disseminated in various places. Last week, I attended a clinic in Woking, which is one of those community hospitals—and at my great age, sadly, I did not have to make use of the family planning clinic, which was in the room next to me. But I was in conversation with young people in their late teens, who were there without their parents’ knowledge and were concerned that they had a sexually transmitted disease. They said that that particular clinic gave them the confidence and freedom to be able to seek advice. Perhaps they would get advice and be treated; it may well be that they would be told that they did not have anything to worry about. But they had gone there because there was no tracking of them. I considered that—and, to me, it is one of the crucial issues. One ought to be able to give people the opportunity to retain their anonymity and privacy when it is right to do so. That is why we need to narrow the definition here; as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, says, we need to keep the scope of the register within reasonable bounds. My amendment is an attempt to do that. I wish to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 6) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 194; Not-Contents, 141