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Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 85:"Page 22, line 26, leave out ““make a report to the Secretary of State”” and insert ““lay before each House of Parliament a general report””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, we now come to what I believe are two very important amendments. In considering the Bill, we must have as our first and primary responsibility the protection of the interests of the citizen. That should also be the first and primary responsibility of the National Identity Scheme Commissioner. The noble Baroness believes that the primary job of the commissioner is to advise the Secretary of State and to reassure him that the identity card scheme is operating correctly. That somewhat bizarre proposition was contained in the Minister’s response to the seventh report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, which recommended that the commissioner should report directly to Parliament—exactly as the Information Commissioner does, which seems a pretty good precedent. I urge the House to reject the proposition advanced by the noble Baroness and to accept Amendment No. 85, which would ensure that the commissioner lays reports before each House of Parliament. The existence of the register and the way in which it is used—or misused—are not trivial matters. They will affect fundamental rights and freedoms. As we discovered during our lengthy examination of the Bill, the Government are taking wide powers to amend the legislation by order. The noble Baroness, on day 6, acknowledged at col. 1518 that while there was no commissioner dealing with passports or driving licences, the Government recognised that the introduction of the identity card scheme, ““raises additional issues””, and so believed that it was right to create what she termed a ““new level of oversight””. We can surely agree that the matter raises additional issues. It creates the register to which a large number of organisations will have access. If we are to have a new level of oversight, surely in logic the commissioner should report to Parliament and not to the Secretary of State, whose department and agencies he is overseeing. It is crucial that the commissioner has the widest possible freedom to do his job and to report what he deems appropriate, subject only to restrictions regarding issues relating to security and crime prevention, contained in Clause 24(3), which we discussed in the previous group. In addition to the topics excluded by that clause from the matters that the commissioner is to keep under review, and which he can report on, my Amendment No. 85A will exclude from his report subjects which, after consultation with the Secretary of State, the commissioner judges to be prejudicial to security or the detection of crime. The noble Baroness built her case to send the report directly to the Secretary of State around those security questions. In practice, and because of the combination of the two provisions to which I have referred, that argument cannot be sustained. The Minister may argue that Clause 25(3) requires the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament a copy of any report made to him by the commissioner, but that is not the same thing at all. Noble Lords with experience of how government works will envisage clearly the pressures that will be placed on the commissioner to exclude from his report any material that the Secretary of State would prefer to keep from Parliament and the people. That is particularly likely in the case of the Home Office. It is a great department of state, and it knows it. There is a certain feeling of superiority that makes those who work there feel that they are perhaps rather better than others—the hoi polloi. It is the sort of attitude that I first experienced rather painfully in my first days as a member of the Cabinet dealing with the sensitive issues of Welsh language broadcasting. I have had other experience—not with the Home Office, but with other departments. Mine was an unusual pattern, in that I was first a Cabinet Minister for eight years and then for eight years I chaired a very large quango—the National Rivers Authority. In our early days we established an enviable reputation for robust independence. Over the years that followed, both the department and the Minister of State responsible for agriculture sought delicately to assert some influence over the line that we should take. It was all beautifully done—very seldom did the Secretary of State himself intervene. There would be a telephone call from a senior official, many of whom were close friends, and whom I greatly respected. There were clear implications that altogether life would be much smoother if we took a rather different line. There was a great deal of press briefing that Lord Crickhowell had gone native on the environment, which I took to be a considerable compliment. It was an indication to my successor when he took over at the Environment Agency that perhaps they would value and support someone who was rather less independent. Partly on the basis of that experience, I do not want the commissioner to be placed in a situation when such pressures can be easily applied. I want him to be a free, independent and robust defender of the interests of every citizen whose name will have been placed compulsorily on the register, reporting not to the Secretary of State, but about the Secretary of State and his agency’s management and conduct of the ID cards project and the register. I want his reports to be placed before Parliament directly, not indirectly. It is Parliament, not the Executive, which is the proper defender of the interests of citizens and their rights. I beg to move.