Clause 8 - Issue etc. of ID cards
Identity Cards Bill
5:45 pm
Patrick Mercer (Shadow Minister (Homeland Security), (Assisted By Shadow Law Officers); Newark, Conservative)
This clause is one of the most important in the Bill. It moves on from the identity register and the number of procedures for orders that are set out under the previous clauses. We are now talking about the thing itself: the card that in several years time, if the Government have their way, we will all end up owning, although, apparently we will not be forced to carry it nor will anybody be able to tell us to show that we have it.
I want to start by discussing the lead amendment, which I hope, despite the innocence of its words, will point up the severity of the cards and the cost of the whole ill-thought-through scheme. The amendment would alter clause 8(1), part of which reads:
''For the purposes of this Act an ID card is a card which—
(a) is issued to an individual by the Secretary of State, or as part of or together with a designated document''.
Our amendment would mean that paragraph (a) would read ''is issued free of charge to an individual by the Secretary of State, or as part of or together with a designated document''. I hope that it goes to the heart of the questions of whether we need the card at all; if we do, how the Government intend to fund it; and the public reaction both to the character of the card and to having to ante up the sum from their pockets to afford it in the first place.
Before I dwell on the details of the card's cost, I want to talk about the opportunity cost. I have just heard an example, which I and others were considering at the weekend, of a wartime national registration identity card. It was a simple piece of cardboard on two sides. I imagine that its cost was almost nothing. Most people believe that this nation's only identity card was carried during the war and suspended shortly after it. That is absolutely right. However, it is worth considering the fact that in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, a modification was introduced to the driving licence that placed it wholly at odds with those carried in the rest of the United Kingdom. In England, one's driving licence was a perfectly simple piece of green paper. There was no photograph or biometric, to use today's phrase, on the card. However, in Northern Ireland a driving licence with a photograph was introduced—in 1978, if memory serves me right. That sticks in my mind because at the time I was a serving soldier, having completed two or three tours in Northern Ireland, and I was returning for another tour. We were told that the driving licence had been introduced with a view not to securing the future of drivers or making it easier or less easy to procure a driving licence, but to having a useful knock-on effect for the purposes of controlling terrorists.
I am sure that every Member knows the nature of Northern Ireland. It has a very dispersed population, among whom the ownership of cars per head is extremely high. On top of that, it has been identified that the use of cars was a sine qua non for the prosecution of terrorism on both sides of the political divide. Issuing an advanced driving licence made sense; it would be a very useful tool for the control of terrorism by the security forces. That licence was an extremely simple document compared with what is proposed today, although it was marginally more complex than the wartime version. I say again that it had a photograph on it.
The opportunity cost of providing that driving licence was considerable. I cannot quote sums, but other security measures had to be forgone to include this driving licence. The effect was quite simple. On a rain-soaked lane in south Armagh at 3 o'clock in the morning, if a patrol was sent forward to intercept a car as it came speeding along a lane, the soldier or policeman inspecting the card, unless they had been specifically told to the contrary, would take a cursory glance at it and say, ''On your way. You've got a card; you must be a good guy. If you're a good guy, I will detain you no longer.''
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough used the phrase ''flash and go'' the other day. I had not thought of the issue in those terms, but that licence involved precisely that. The danger of introducing an identity card, particularly for security and counter-terrorism, is that it does not become a proof of identity, but a pass. Once someone possesses such a card, particularly a complex card that has been through several biometrics iterations, it becomes, for the security worker—soldier, policeman or whoever—a pass into the inner sanctum.
We all carry similar passes to let us into the House of Commons. That is a slightly different matter because our faces are generally recognised by the excellent security staff here. None the less, it stands to reason that unless the holder is carefully looked at, the possession of a card—particularly a complex one—starts to work to the benefit of the terrorist or criminal.