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UK Borders Bill

I should like to put the mind of the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) at rest. I am not sure whether they are ideas or proposals from Commissioner Frattini about the blue card scheme, but we certainly have no intention of joining those proposals, and I suspect that we shall not be alone among the European member states in striking that position. Let me pick up on the three points of substance that were raised in the debate. The first was an important point about whether destruction would effectively mean destruction. The answer is yes. Of course, that will be set out in slightly longer sentences when the regulations are introduced. As the House will know, those regulations will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, so I hope that there will be an opportunity for a longer debate on the matter. For the purposes of this afternoon, however, I hope that that underlining will be sufficient. On the question of sharing information, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) tempts me. He knows that my background is in the technology business. I shall try not to detain the House for hours and hours—although I happily could—about the system architecture that we proposed in the strategic action plan published last December. In a nutshell, the system will effectively link together an existing Government database called CIS, which is a repository of biographical information, and a new database that will contain the biometric information. That will allow us to hard-wire a link between a single biographical record and a single biometric record. There are some pretty strong safeguards around duplication.