Clause 4 - Electoral identity card
Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Bill
6:45 pm
Mr Des Browne (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Northern Ireland Office; Kilmarnock and Loudoun, Labour)
If it is any help to the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire, if it makes his day, I will go some of the way with him. I said at the outset that I had no objection in principle to the amendment. That is the best he is going to get from me today—that I have no objection in principle. I suppose that I could also say that I have no objection in principle to the Liberal Democrats.
Perhaps more importantly, we need to consider how the public would view a card incorporating a chip. We always have to bear it in mind that what we are embarking upon will, at the end of the day, require us to persuade about 30 per cent. of the voting public in Northern Ireland that they should volunteer to get an identity card for this purpose. We have to take those people with us. There will be a job of education and persuasion to be done. Many of those people will be elderly people, who may have no other forms of identification, and who may be suspicious of what they are being asked to carry around and what it can be used for.
We ought not to add any more hurdles to our task of persuading the public. How would the hon. Lady or I persuade an elderly person that he or she should accept an identity card with an electronic chip that served no actual purpose in relation to the reason for the card being issued, but that might serve a purpose at some time in future? It seems unnecessary and we should not place ourselves in the position of having to deal with it. People must not be dissuaded by our actions from applying for a card because they have fears, whether they are grounded or groundless. If that were to happen, we could not, in all conscience, withdraw the non-photographic forms of identification. We may find that we have defeated our objective because we have disfranchised many people who would not go along with the measure.
We cannot be seen to be denying people their vote. Equally, we cannot be seen to be defeating the principal objective by stretching slightly too far. We do not need to stretch as far as this at present. We may in future need to stretch, but when we do we will have to do so in the context of a better argued case and with technology that will allow us actually to use those chips. I hope therefore that the hon. Lady will be persuaded to withdraw the amendment, but I look forward to it being resurrected in the future, when the electronic industry and voting in general have caught up with her enthusiasm.