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Identity Cards

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is talking complete nonsense. He needs to go back and read the Identity Cards Act 2006 and look at the difference between the two schemes, one of which is a vast collection of personal data, as opposed to a limited amount of information needed to issue a passport. If he does not understand the difference between the two, I am afraid that I will not be able to help him. Does the Home Secretary intend to press ahead with making it compulsory for passport applicants to be entered on to the national identity register? When will that happen? Can he give us an updated statement of the costs of the scheme? How much is the total bill? He talked about the scheme being self-funding. How long will that take? How many people will need to sign up for an identity card before the scheme becomes fully self-funding? Frankly, I do not believe that it is possible to make the scheme self-financing. That raises a third question—the subject of the motion tonight—straightforwardly, why cannot he just scrap the scheme now? While the Government have been promoting a scheme that is becoming less and less substantial by the week, a considerable opportunity cost has been lost to the country. Although the Home Office's considerable resources could have been devoted to sorting out the problems that we actually have, the Government have been concentrating on inventing the answer to a problem that we do not have. They could have been working on sorting out the asylum system and the immigration system, designing a better strategy for countering terrorism and dealing with policing issues, yet they have devoted eight years to a massive national folly. I had hoped that the signals given out by the Home Secretary when he took office meant that he had brought a degree of common sense to his new job. How wrong I was. I should not have been surprised, though. The Government are no longer capable of taking clear-cut and straightforward decisions; instead, they just dither. If they are not sure about ID cards, they say, "We're not sure if we can scrap them, so let's have an unworkable, botched job instead." That is no way to govern this country and no way to run the Home Office. They should either stand by their principles and believe that the scheme has a purpose—in which case, stick with it and get on with the job—or they should accept that they were wrong and make big changes. Sitting with one leg on either side of the fence is the most ungainly and painful of all options, but the Government have long since forgotten how to do anything else. So, tonight, we have given the House an opportunity to put the Home Secretary out of his misery and to give a clear answer on ID cards: get rid of what is a ludicrous fudge and scrap the ID card scheme once and for all.