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Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 121A:"Page 39, line 18, at beginning insert ““Subject to subsection (3A),””" The noble Earl said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 121A, I shall also speak to Amendment No. 122A. The Government Front Bench will be only too well aware of my habit of seeking to debate what may appear to be arcane issues. Indeed, the Minister made oblique reference to this earlier in proceedings. Be that as it may, the technical standards directives appear to be relevant here. Helpfully, TRIS—the acronym for the technical regulations information system of the Enterprise Directorate-General of the European Commission—publishes an idiot’s guide to the procedure to be adopted in respect of draft technical regulations concerning information society services. This outlines a series of tests to be carried out on a member state’s draft legislative proposals, to see if they should be notified to the Commission. By my interpretation, the Bill satisfies these. Here, I should once again express my gratitude to the Minister for her commentary on the point in her letter of 11 January. I do not dispute that Directive 98/34/EC, as she says,"““is aimed at barriers to trade which result from technical regulations relating to products””." That said, I wonder if the noble Baroness has fully taken on board the effect of the amending directive, 94/98/EC, which adds ““information society services”” to the scope of the procedure. Crucially, albeit that the Bill is substantially an enabling measure, in its first phase it gives effect to,"““an information society service, that is to say any service normally provided for a remuneration at a distance, by electronic means and at the individual request of a recipient of services””." On the face of it, therefore, the Bill should be notified to the Commission. I doubt that the Government will share my view. With that in mind, and in the spirit of helpfulness, I propose to advance what might be a more persuasive justification for the amendment. The Government have been keen to argue that their proposals are not unique and that, in fact, there is a pan-European if not global move towards the establishment of biometric standards of identity verification. That raises the serious issue of the extent to which our UK identity system will be interoperable and compatible with equivalent arrangements elsewhere in the world. For my part, I would not favour that acting as a precursor for routine data sharing between countries; that would be unacceptable. But in respect of law enforcement, and given the global nature of terrorism, built-in interoperability and compatibility would be beneficial. The Government might seek to argue that that is indeed the intention of their proposals for passports and that the trend is towards international standardisation, but passport regimes around the world are being developed in a piecemeal fashion. At least in part, that is a function of the ICAO’s standard. The LSE report observes:"““In attempting to accommodate flexibility for the varying demands of the member states of the ICAO working groups, the ICAO subverted its primary goal of interoperability””." Nor is the supposed EU standard being rolled out on a consistent basis. My noble friend Lord Selsdon alluded to that last week. For example, Denmark has indeed implemented biometric passports but, in contrast to the scheme envisaged here, the biometric is limited to a digital photograph and is stored on a chip in the passport rather than on a central register. The pan-European context here is particularly important. We have already debated the substance of this matter under the umbrella of Amendment No. 111A. In that context, I merely say that if I am uncomfortable about the scheme proposed in this Bill, I am even less enamoured of a system devised for the whole EU. Nevertheless, that would seem to be what we are committed to by virtue of the ministerial decision. That being so, it is incumbent on the Government to make use of the technical standards procedure to guarantee appropriate levels of mutuality and interoperability between this scheme and those of our European partners. The global context is equally pertinent. Here it is interesting to note that Cal Slemp, vice-president and global leader for security and privacy services at IBM Global Services, has suggested that there is a requirement for wider international co-operation and a common language and standards in respect of IAM—that is, identity and access management. In commenting about the current state of play, he says that,"““we’ve got inconsistent and incomplete implementation and also no standard approach to the future nor a target to shoot at””." Yet the Bill is silent on that point—or, rather, it appears to assume that it is appropriate that the scheme be developed in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in the world, let alone on our own doorstep in Europe. That is all the more reason for the Bill to be subject to the technical standards procedure as a means of ensuring consistency of approach to a European level and furthering deeper standardisation globally. After all, that is the stated purpose of the notification process: it seeks,"““to provide a stable, transparent and consistent framework””," for,"““national legislative initiatives specifically concerning information society services””." I beg to move.