Clause 3 - Information recorded in Register
Identity Cards Bill
6:45 pm
Mr Richard Allan (Shadow Spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, Cabinet Office; Sheffield, Hallam, Liberal Democrat)
This is a large area of political theoretical debate, and I shall not go into it. Suffice it to say that the way in which the tests occur are different in common law countries and constitutional countries. A constitutional country will have a constitutional court that decides whether a provision breaches some fundamental right set out in the constitution. Ours is a different tradition, but sometimes we have a more complex equation to work out when considering individual pieces of legislation, because we have to test the whole gamut of Acts that may interact with each other in a common law scenario, rather than consider legislation against a specific set of constitutional provisions. However, I recognise that the Human Rights Act 1998, and, in particular, article 8 of the European convention on human rights—the right to privacy—as well as issues such as the necessity of proportionality are perhaps starting to give us a clearer framework.
We have explored all the items in schedule 1, and I welcome the fact that the Minister said that he would give us further clarity on issues such as addresses. It would be helpful to have an example record before us as we consider the Bill, because we are talking about something that we have not seen yet. The Minister sometimes says, ''Well, it's not going to be like that'', but we have to guess what the record will be like, because we have not been given any examples of what the Government expect it to be like. Whether we are talking about 51 items or 57 varieties of ID card, it would be helpful to have a clear example of what the Minister intends. We will not necessarily hold him to the example, as he may want to change his mind later, but some suggestion would be extraordinarily helpful.
There are some basic principles: the more complex we make the system, the more costly and potentially intrusive it will be. We have sought throughout our proceedings to simplify it. If the Minister is to reject our amendments taking away secondary legislation powers, I hope that he can at least give us assurances that he does not intend to use them to depart radically from what is in schedule 1. Otherwise, it would completely devalue the primary legislative process that we are going through today.