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UK Borders Bill

I will leave the Minister to deal with my hon. Friend, who makes his point with characteristic clarity. I would like to extend the point made about the Schengen agreement. The Minister has helpfully confirmed that the Government will not sign up to it. Will he also confirm that the Government will maintain our position on the Commission's blue card proposal, and that they have no intention of giving up our reservation on that? As the Minister correctly said, Conservative Members expressed a great deal of anxiety throughout earlier debates about the catch-all quality that the measure would grant the Home Secretary. In so far as the powers are now less all-embracing, we welcome the step forward. Again, several questions have arisen during the Bill's passage through both Houses, which Ministers have not yet answered. I hope that the Minister can do that now, in the last knockings of our proceedings. My first question relates to the use of documents in the proposed national identity register. When the information is destroyed—for which the group of amendments would provide—will it be removed altogether from the national identity register? If the intention is to destroy sensitive personal information, it will be more reassuring for those to whom it refers to know that no traces of it exist anywhere on a register, which many of us believe will be a honeypot to hackers, and a principal target of global attack by hackers who may have nefarious purposes, such as fraud, in mind. My second question is about the spread of information around Departments. The national identity register is a compendium of three different Government computer systems—if they all talk to each other. That is a large assumption, but I shall make it for the purposes of the debate. Is it the intention to add the new biometric information to all three systems that will form the national identity register? What tests have been conducted to ensure that that is technically possible? I appreciate that those are technical questions about the future, but the Minister will understand the thrust of the point: even though he has restricted the Home Secretary's powers, which is good, genuine, serious questions remain about the proposal's practicality. I hope that he can tackle them.