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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I hope that I will be able to give the noble Baroness satisfaction on these points. On the narrowing of the clause to which she refers, it may be that something can be done. However, I am not able to accept her amendments for the reasons I shall set out. It is important to remember that Clause 14 addresses information from the register being provided with the consent of the individual concerned. It is right that I should begin by clearing up a little confusion which arose towards the end of our last sitting in Committee. The technical government amendment I mentioned as part of a large group should indeed have been Amendment No. 64, not Amendment No. 66. The error was made in the groupings list rather than in my notes. I see that it has now been corrected. So it is government Amendment No. 66 that we are discussing here. I apologise to noble Lords for any confusion that may have been caused. Perhaps I should have been more confident that I was right and the list was wrong, but as noble Lords know I am quick to accept my own fallibility. Amendment No. 62E seeks to provide that the Secretary of State could not add to the information provided by Schedule 1 unless he was satisfied that the additional information was information the individual would regularly need to prove. I recognise, as I think the noble Baroness has mentioned, that the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform was critical about the width of this power. Clearly it is both necessary and desirable to allow the scheme to adapt to different user requirements in the future, but we would not seek to expand the list of information that may be provided under Clause 14 unless there was a clear user need. In that sense, our policy is not at odds in any way with the terms of the noble Baroness’s amendment. Also, we would not use the power to remove subsections (2) and (3) altogether, a possibility that caused concern in the committee, and indeed was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, this evening. For various reasons, I cannot accept Amendment No. 62E, but I will undertake to return at Third Reading with an amendment that narrows the scope of the power in Clause 14(4)(a). I do not think the noble Baroness was suggesting that her amendment was the perfect construct; it simply gives us an opportunity to look at how we should do this. I agree with her that there is perhaps something we can do there. The effect of Amendments Nos. 63, 66 and 74 is, as the noble Baroness has indicated, that the Secretary of State will in practice be obliged to set up a system of accreditation in relation to persons to whom information may be provided from the register. We have always intended that there should be an accreditation system and that regulations should be made, but as the committee pointed out in paragraph 46 of its report, Clauses 14, 17 and 23 do not by themselves secure that there must be such a system. These amendments remedy that. Amendment No. 63 has the effect of obliging the Secretary of State to make regulations under Clause 14(6)(a) and (b) that make the provision of information with consent conditional on the recipient of that information being accredited. Amendment No. 66 has the effect of obliging the Secretary of State to make regulations under Clause 17(3)(a) and (b) that make the provision of information to public service providers conditional on those providers being accredited. Amendment No. 74 has the effect of obliging the Secretary of State to make regulations under Clause 23(4)(a) that make the provision of information without consent conditional upon the recipients of that information being accredited. The only recipients of information who will not have to be accredited are those specified on the face of the Bill in Clauses 19 to 22. The DPC did not require the removal of Clause 22; rather, it considered that insufficient justification had been put forward for this clause. We intend to come back to this at Third Reading with further justification. Amendment No. 72A would remove Clause 22 from the Bill. This clause contains a power under which an order may be made specifying persons to whom information may be provided from the register in situations not covered by Clauses 19 to 21. The power only applies to information not falling within paragraph 9 of Schedule 1; the audit trail information is not covered. The power applies only in relation to public authorities as defined by the Human Rights Act, and only with regard to the provision of information that is necessary in the public interest as defined in Clause 1 of the Bill, which sets out the statutory purposes. Again, the power is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. Examples of how this clause might be used include authorising information to be provided without consent for use by registrars-general of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; to receive information to be used for statistical purposes; or to local authorities for council tax or housing benefit administration. Neither would be covered by the definition of ““government department”” in Clause 19(5). In addition, Clause 22 would permit the Secretary of State to provide information to bodies such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission. In the future it may be necessary to provide this organisation with information about someone’s identity to assist it in an investigation that it is conducting. Without Clause 22 we would have no power to provide it with information from the register as it would not fall under the definition of a ““government department””. We believe it is right therefore that we ensure Parliament has the opportunity to consider further uses when there are convincing reasons for doing so, and that we do not limit the effectiveness of the scheme by requiring any public authority which has a convincing reason for requesting information from the database to wait until there is appropriate primary legislation. We are confident that we have provided adequate safeguards by restricting the circumstances in which information can be provided to those where provision is to a public authority and is in the public interest.