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Identity Cards

No, I will not. I do not have much time. When my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) raised with the Home Secretary the example of the Scottish Parliament, the right hon. Gentleman rather brushed it aside, but it is an important example. When the Scottish Parliament voted on the principle of ID cards, no one, but no one, supported it. The Labour party abstained en masse. But the Scottish Parliament controls public services in many areas in Scotland, and ID cards or biometric passports will not be made compulsory to access those services, whatever the Government down here choose to do. The Home Secretary assured us that the database was totally secure—he even stated, if I heard him correctly, that it was not downloadable. I am no computer expert, but I am fairly certain that it would be impossible to create a database that is not downloadable in any event. Others have mentioned the Government's record both on IT projects and on loss of data, so I shall not elaborate further. I am concerned about the huge costs associated with the database and the lack of clarity about the costs involved. The Government give a cost of between £4 billion and £5 billion. In an intervention, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who is no longer in his place, pointed out that for that cost to be covered, some 35 million people would have to get an identity card voluntarily at a cost of £30. Members can decide how likely it is that that number will do so, unless the Government try to make it compulsory by the back door. That is not the largest cost that has been estimated for the scheme. There is great difficulty involved in trying to find out the true cost of the identity card scheme. The London School of Economics put a 10-year cost range between £10.6 billion and £19.3 billion. That has been strongly attacked by the Government, who do not accept those figures, about which there has been considerable controversy. Using the method employed by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West, as I pointed out earlier, more than the entire population of the UK would have to apply voluntarily for an identity card at a cost of £30 for the Government to get anywhere near covering the projected cost. It is impossible, and the figures do not add up. It is interesting to note that such is the controversy about the figures that the London School of Economics has stated that it will not issue further costings because of the secrecy and contradictions around the identity card scheme. It should cause all Members great concern that we cannot get even such basic information. The identity card has been proposed for all sorts of reasons, but there is no evidence that it will deal with those problems. There is no evidence that it is a cost-effective way of addressing those problems—for example, benefit fraud. Identity is only a tiny part of the problem of fraud in the benefits system, and even if the identity card helped to tackle that, it would not tackle the main problem. Many countries have much worse identity card theft than Britain, because they rely on a single reference source, which will effectively be the problem if we move towards an identity card or a biometric passport in this country. Commenting on the recent announcement by the Home Secretary, Liberty said that the Government proposal still amounted to a compulsory scheme. It said:""The Home Secretary needs to be clear as to whether entry on to the National Identity Register will continue to be automatic when applying for a passport. If so, the identity scheme will be compulsory in practice.""However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant. And this white elephant would be as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses."" I could not agree more with Liberty. The whole thing is a disaster area. It does not do what it says on the tin, to quote someone else. It will be a massive cost that we cannot afford in these economic times, it is a waste of money and it should be ditched immediately.