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Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 14A:"Page 2, line 42, leave out ““16”” and insert ““18””" The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 14A, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 16A and 16B, which are grouped with it. These matters were debated in Committee. At that stage, they were dealt with in amendments moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in the debate on 23 November, as reported at col. 1675, and they received my support. The Minister gave a very full response, for which I am grateful, and she addressed the issue constructively. I have brought back the amendments simply because I noted that the noble Baroness did not quite manage to address one specific issue in her response, and I shall deal with that also. I need to refer to further developments as a result of a   couple of press reports that appeared on 9   December—two weeks after that debate. So the amendments are brought back in that spirit for further clarification. I do not think that I will need to go further either tonight or at Third Reading because I anticipate that the noble Baroness will be able to reassure me on some points—fingers crossed. Amendment No. 14A would raise the age of requirement to register for an ID card from 16 to 18. The difficulty is that when the Minister brought forward her arguments for saying that 16 is the starting age at which one should automatically be brought into the registration process, I remained rather uneasy. Any government—this is not a party-political point—seem to have the odd habit of treating people between the ages of 16 and 18 sometimes as adults and sometimes as children. On the previous occasion, it was easy for the noble Baroness to say, ““Well, people between the ages of 16 and 18 might be rather annoyed if they did not have this because they like to be able to prove their age””. Unlike someone like me, who does not like to be reminded of my age, they are proud of their age and like to be able to prove it, particularly—I do not refer to the group to which the Minister referred—when they are over 18 so that they can drink in pubs or elsewhere. The difficulty is that if children are forced to register their data at 16—in most law they are still children at that age—and they do not consent to the sharing of that data, it is a breach of Article 16 of the UNCRC, which provides children with the rights to a private and family life. Any interference with that would have to be justified in the public interest, and Article 8(2) of the convention covers that. Although the Minister dealt with the practical implications in her response, she did not respond to the argument about the convention, and I wonder whether she can address that. I have this matter at the forefront of my mind at the moment because, as we wend our way through this Bill, and the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill in Grand Committee, we are gearing ourselves up for the Violent Crime Reduction Bill, and I am very aware that that Bill treats people between the ages of 16 and 18 rather like children. I am uneasy that the Government are concentrating on the practical realities, which do carry problems, and I need to step back and look at the philosophical problem of the UNCRC. If the Minister could address that point, I should be grateful. Amendment No. 16A would prevent the Secretary of State lowering the age at which a person can be entered on the register if the national register of children has been started or fully established under Section 12 of the Children Act 2004. Amendment No. 16B would prevent the Secretary of State transferring to the ID register any registrable fact about a child under the age of 16 which had been obtained on the basis that it was going to be used for the purposes of the register to be set up under that same Children Act 2004—unless, that is, the parent or guardian of the child had given written permission for the information to be transferred to the ID register. Here, we come to the newspaper reports that I noticed on 9 December. Both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail stated that Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Education, had announced that every child will be given an ID card number from 2008—coincidentally, the year that the Government intend to introduce the first stage of what we call ““compulsion by stealth”” and the noble Baroness calls ““voluntary registration”” in this Bill. Ruth Kelly said that the £200 million information-sharing register would go ahead, despite the fears that it could be accessed by paedophiles. At the same time, the children’s Minister, Beverley Hughes, said—or the paper has her saying—that the database should have,"““strong safeguards to make sure information stored is minimal, secure and used appropriately””." Of course, last March, the Labour-dominated Education Select Committee warned that the child index could be abused. The report stated:"““We have significant reservations about whether this will be the best uses of resources and very significant concerns about critical issues such as security, confidentiality and access arrangements””." That is my concern too. In her response on 23 November in col. 1681, the Minister reminded the House that the child register and the ID register have two different functions. I agree with her. The child register is intended to allow practitioners to share information about children to improve their well-being. We all agree with that; it is an admirable objective. The problem is that there will be significant amounts of information that should not necessarily be transferred or transferable to the ID register and we need to make it clear in this Bill that that cannot happen. My concern is that the child index will go ahead at the same time as the initial period of the ID cards. Until we know that the security of the child index system is robust, there should not be a power for the Secretary of State to transfer information on children from the child index to the ID register unless permission has clearly been given by a parent or a guardian. I beg to move.