Identity Cards

Part of Opposition Day — [15th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 8:50 pm on 6 July 2009.

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Photo of Stephen Dorrell Stephen Dorrell Conservative, Charnwood 8:50, 6 July 2009

I listened with considerable care and interest to what Keith Vaz had to say on this subject. I thought that I was going to agree with virtually everything he said until he concluded that he was with the Government, although he might be about to peel off. I am not with the Government on this issue, but I absolutely share the right hon. Gentleman's sense that this is a policy in search of a problem. Every time I hear Ministers explaining why it should be supported, I sense that the problem that it was intended to solve has changed since the previous time I heard them justifying it.

I have always taken a reasonably relaxed view of this policy. I have not objected to it in principle from the beginning, based on civil libertarian propositions. There are clearly civil liberties issues at stake in relation to identity cards, and particularly in relation to the national identity register, but I was, and still am, prepared to concede in principle that arguments could be made to justify introducing such measures that would outweigh the civil liberties issues involved.

However, as the arguments have been made, I have become less and less convinced by the merits claimed for ID cards and the register, and more and more concerned, partly about the cost implications—I will come back to that—but mostly about what we are learning about the culture of the Government and their attitudes towards the civil liberties involved. They have not been consistent in their development of the arguments for the merits claimed for the policy, and they have demonstrated a cavalier attitude towards the civil liberties issues that leaves me very worried about the weight attached to those issues in the mind of the Government in assessing the balance of the benefits.

Let us begin with the specific benefits that have been claimed for the policy during the time that the Government have been advocating it. It was introduced by the former Prime Minister, and it has been followed up by the present one. It was said to be the key element in the Government's fight against terrorism and benefit fraud, and in the enforcement of proper immigration controls. All those claims have been made for the introduction of ID cards, but as each claim has been made and challenged, the argument has moved on. We have not heard any justification of the claim that the policy will deliver significant benefits in terms of counter-terrorism or benefit fraud, or in terms of other, broader aspects of law enforcement.

The point of my earlier question to the Home Secretary was that I would like to hear a Minister talk me through the logic of having a voluntary system of law enforcement that will provide a vigorous means of enforcing laws that we cannot currently enforce to the standard that we would wish. If it is voluntary, I do not see how it can become the cutting edge of law enforcement. I have never heard that flaw in the logic explained.

The claims that have been made for the ID card have made anyone interested in public policy sit up—they have also been directed at voters and designed to make them sit up—but those claims have never been substantiated. What we then need to do is to look at the costs in the cost-benefit balance that are undoubtedly involved in the development of this policy, costs both literal and metaphorical.

First, as to the costs literal, it is unclear from the figures bandied about by the Government, by the Opposition Front Benchers and by various interested IT experts exactly how many thousands of millions of pounds this scheme is going to cost. But even if we take the Home Secretary's most modest interpretation, we are talking about £1,000 million, which is going to be recovered at £30 a head from people buying voluntary ID cards. In his days as the Health Secretary—I speak as a former Health Secretary—I suspect that the current Home Secretary could have found quite a lot of attractive uses for £1,000 million beyond giving people a piece of plastic that will allow them to identify themselves as aged over 18 when they go into a bar. This seems to me to be an essentially frivolous use of a significant level of resource as we go into a recession—and this, as I said, is to take the Home Secretary on his own terms.

The reality is that almost all independent parties think that the scheme will cost significantly more than the Home Secretary acknowledges, and whether it is a charge made on ID card users or on passport users or paid by taxpayers, it is unarguably a cost that is not currently borne by the economy but which the Government intend the economy to bear in the years ahead at a time when fewer resources will be available. The Government's decision to impose those costs on the economy will necessarily squeeze out other expenditure that seems to me to have higher benefits attached—or, of course, deny the possibility of reducing the tax burden in order to promote the more efficient development of economic activity in Britain. The Government have made no convincing benefit claims for this policy and have not seriously addressed the pounds cost that they are imposing on the British economy.

That brings me to my next point, which I believe is the strongest argument against the policy that the Government are pursuing because it tells us about the culture in Government in terms of the importance that they attach to the privacy of the citizen and the maintenance of citizens' defences against the developing power of the state. The power of the state is enhanced, of course, by the power of modern information technology.

I believe that among the responsibilities of those elected to this place is our responsibility to seek to insist that the Government should account for increases in the power they wield over the private citizen. We, as Members of Parliament, should be jealous of the privacy of the people who send us here, and we should be concerned to restrain the ambitions of Government to invade the privacy of the people who send us here. What concerns me most about the policy is that it demonstrates that the Government do not observe those same instincts. The national identity register is already subject to inadequate control. What information are we going to be obliged to contribute to this register? The answer is that it is defined by secondary legislation and we are already hearing that extension of the scope of such information is anticipated.