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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I support the noble Lord on Amendment No. 101A and the whole issue of the warning. I do not think that it would be right if I repeated arguments on that, as I spoke on that subject in detail in Committee. The noble Lord is right in thinking that there was a feeling across the Chamber that it is not sufficient to say to somebody that there is a method of appeal; if you have not tried to be culpable in the first place, it is error rather than culpability, and one should not have to go through the position of going through a whole legal gamut of appealing to prevent a penalty being imposed. Amendment No. 105B refers specifically to consultation. I agree with the noble Lord; it is as important here as it is anywhere in the Bill that there should be consultation with the public on these matters. That was certainly brought home to me very clearly when I had a meeting on another Bill last week—the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill—with a group of people who had come together for the first time to express their views about how immigration legislation will affect them. They are representatives of Chinese, Bangladeshi and Indian communities. We had a discussion beyond the remit of the Bill about how consultation is or is not carried out. Last night, I received from the vice-chairman of the North London Chinese Association an email that is pertinent to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. The vice-chair raises the whole issue of how the Home Office currently carries out its consultation process and what plans it has to do so in future. I thought that it would be right to put on record one or two concerns that those communities have, because I have referred in the past to the race equality impact assessment, and the problems with that in this Bill. The questions that they ask are with regard to the fact that, if the Government are minded to carry out consultations—perhaps on Amendment No. 105A, but generally on the Identity Cards Bill—will they in future ensure that they,"““include a non-compulsory invitation to the respondent to disclose the respondent’s ethnic group when someone . . . responds to a government consultation””?" Would they,"““publish the ethnic breakdown of respondents to consultations””," and will they,"““encourage the Home Office to hurry up with the standard list of stakeholders””," which they understand that the Home Office is in the process of compiling? They hope that the Government will,"““make positive efforts to include the Chinese community and business associations on it””." That raises the whole issue of how the Government anticipate consultation being carried out. In particular, will they consult on the code of practice with regard to penalties? That is a core issue; there will be a great deal of interest from the public generally and from specific ethnic groups within the community about how they would be affected by the code of practice on penalties. We have already had an indication of that from the CRE earlier in our debates on this measure.