Clause 1 - The National Identity Register
Identity Cards Bill
5:15 pm
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Liberal Democrat)
I shall deal with that point in due course. I, too, do not intend to take up too much of the Committee's time.
We are told that we are dealing with enabling legislation; as a consequence, surely the paragraphs that we seek to remove are unnecessary. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland said, function creep is built into the Bill by paragraphs (c) to (i). We seek to help the Government. They are addressing the reduction in public support for identity cards and the attendant register, which appears to be due to a fear on two counts. First, there are concerns about function creep and what might happen next; secondly, people are concerned that costs will spiral out of control. The removal of those paragraphs would allow the Government to dispel the fears that their intentions for the scheme are the nefarious ones that some suspect they might be.
A proliferation of registrable facts also increases the likelihood that individuals will be required to change those facts. Besides a person's identity and where they may be contacted, all the other pieces of information are, quite properly, subject to change. If that happens, regular updates will be necessary—probably annually for many people—which will cost money. I have a copy of the London School of Economics report that the Government have rubbished, which says that rapidly rising cost correlates with the number of registrable facts and the opportunities for people to change their data. If we cut down the data, we will cut the costs and perhaps stop the haemorrhage of support. We seek merely to be helpful by seeking to remove extraneous registrable facts.
The Government occasionally express injured incredulity when we suggest that some of the purposes to which the ID cards scheme may be put could be anything other than positive. I am equally incredulous that they can see no way in which the scheme can be abused. Obviously, Parliament cannot bind its successors. I gently teased Conservative Members yesterday that they might have found the legislation extremely useful during the miners' strike and the attempts to make people pay the poll tax.
Indeed, the Conservatives might have found the legislation useful in the cold war, when some members of the now governing party may have been members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, protesting outside various missile bases. That information would, of course, have been scrubbed from those individuals' personal databases, but nonetheless, they might have been involved. I am quite sure that Lady Thatcher's Government would have used such a database to great effect and would have been grateful to any previous Labour Government who had established it. It is naive of the Government to think that, however fluffy, cuddly and pro-civil rights they are, a successor Government might not think that the legislation was wonderful and rub their hands with glee.
My hon. Friend has made the case for the amendment well. Without going into further detail, I point out that paragraphs (g) and (h) enable the state to create almost a map of people's lives, as was mentioned, and introduce the risk that information properly held on the database will be linked with information held elsewhere. A wider concern is that various branches of the public and private sector might, quite sensibly—and perhaps quite innocently—seek to use the ID card number as a single identifier.
That is a way into a wider and deeper form of single identification—a point that I raised in an intervention yesterday. We could get to the stage at which the importance of that single identifier and its value as a prize for those with criminal intent grows, at which the effort, intellect and resources put in by people with criminal intent will be that much more concentrated and at which, once a person has their identity stolen, it will be much more damaging.
To answer the question posed earlier, I do not particularly want a right to have information stored on me centrally. I am quite capable of retaining in my own head, or on my personal databases, any information that I may wish to be reminded of about my life, where I have been and where I might go. We would not be damaging people's civil liberties too much if we prevent them from telling the Government things that the Government do not need to know.