Orders of the Day — Identity Cards Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:29 pm on 20 December 2004.

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Photo of Mr Andrew Bennett Mr Andrew Bennett Labour, Denton and Reddish 7:29, 20 December 2004

We have to be very careful with ID cards, and the sensible solution is to let people have the peripheral cards that they currently have, not to insist that they have a national card.

I intended to be brief, and I come to my last point: the desire to make changes by secondary legislation and the great number of powers in the Bill in respect of which the Government can come back to the House for an order under the affirmative procedure. There is a huge difference between trying to get primary legislation through the House and introducing secondary legislation. Primary legislation takes several months at the quickest and more often than not takes nine months. There is not only the debate in the Chamber and the argument in Committee; it is the debate in the country that is important. That happens on primary legislation, but regulation can be announced one day, and with a big Government majority, it can be introduced within 48 hours or so of publication.

That is a change in the nature of legislation, and I argue very strongly that we should not have the ID cards legislation at all, and that we should certainly not be introducing in that legislation powers for Governments fundamentally to change it and drift towards what will in effect become a police state. I am totally opposed to the legislation.