Clause 1 - The National Identity Register
Identity Cards Bill
2:45 pm
Mr Des Browne (Minister of State (Citizenship, Immigration and Counter-Terrorism), Home Office; Kilmarnock and Loudoun, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman says that it holds a single fact; it holds a substantial amount of information about people and not just a single fact. It holds details of who the parents were, where the individual was born, their date of birth, and their gender. Indeed, for a period of time it held the parents' occupations. I have not asked for such an extract for anybody for a long time, because I have not practised as a solicitor for some time, so I am not sure, but I think that it includes the parents' occupations.
The point is that if the lobby that is against ID cards—it would not be fair to say the civil liberties lobby, because it is not everybody—is to construct a massive attack on the basis that the proposals shift fundamentally the relationship between the individual and the state, it is up to that lobby to make that argument. I include the hon. Gentleman in that. The argument must be made in a coherent and intellectually honest fashion. It is not open to that lobby to ignore the registers and databases that exist and what they are used for, and to argue that we must all accept that they are for limited purposes but that this measure is substantially different. It is not. I do not get any sense that people are persuaded that there will be a massive change.
The hon. Gentleman may say that the difference is that the databases that he referred to are for limited purposes, but that the proposed register is for everything. No doubt the argument will change from specific purposes to limited purposes; I shall make the argument for him before he intervenes. The register is for the purposes that are laid out in the Bill. I grant that those purposes are more extensive than some of the purposes for which other databases are held, and I grant also that the specific purposes that are set out subsume some of the purposes for which other databases are held by the Government. However, they do not add significantly to the powers that public authorities already enjoy.
The purposes offer authorities, the police in particular and those who provide public services the opportunity for the first time to use a guaranteed, accurate database. Until now, it has been hit and miss and up to the value of the documentation or the information that the individual or somebody else could produce. If the system works, provides the level of certainty that it should and is tied to biometric information, an individual can be certain for the first time that people are provided with accurate information about their identity and, more importantly, that no one is stealing it.