Oral Answers to Questions — Home Department – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 18 May 2009.
What assessment she has made of the likely uptake of voluntary identity cards in the pilot scheme in Manchester.
Identity cards will start to be available to British citizens resident in Manchester from the autumn, at a fee of £30, and will, I am sure, become popular with members of the public who want a convenient and secure means of proving their identity.
I thank the Secretary of State for saying that with a straight face. Could she tell the House how low the take-up needs to be before the Government realise that they have very little public support and that the ID cards scheme is a complete waste of money?
The most recent research on the national identity service as a whole has shown, as research has consistently shown, that about 60 per cent. of the British public support the identity card scheme and less than 25 per cent. disagree with it. People will have the opportunity—and have already begun to take that opportunity—to register their interest and, in Manchester, to get the security and convenience that comes from being able to prove their identity far more securely than they can now.
The cost of identity cards has surged by a further quarter of a billion pounds to the present figure of £5.3 billion, which excludes every Government Department apart from the Home Office, and also excludes businesses, citizens and many sectors of society. Does the Home Secretary believe that there is a risk that the Manchester citizens who signed up for the card—no doubt in the fiction section of the central library, while having a continental breakfast—have signed away their privacy for life and given a blank cheque to this and, perhaps, future Governments?
I know that my hon. Friend would not want the facts to get in the way of an amusing question. He is wrong: the costs have not increased in the way in which he suggests. Last year, we were able to demonstrate a reduction of £1 billion in the cost of the instigation of the national identity service over the next 10 years. The cost for the people of Manchester to take up this opportunity on a purely voluntary basis will be £30, and we will see how many of them want to take up the opportunity.
Can the Home Secretary not acknowledge that, whatever the precise figure, it is an enormous one, and that the scheme is never going to happen because no sane Government will pursue it? So why does she not chuck it?
There are already people in this country who have identity cards in their hands and in their wallets. We have already issued 30,000 identity cards to foreign nationals, and by November this year that figure will be 75,000. The hon. Gentleman might want to wish the scheme away, but it exists in this country now. I believe, given the level of support that we have consistently maintained for identity cards, that a sane Government will recognise the benefits to individuals of being able to find a more secure, more convenient way of proving their identity, which many of us have to do often in our lives. When we put that alongside the security that comes from being able to tie our identity to ourselves in a modern world, we can recognise the benefits. Also, as I pointed out to the House either at the previous Home Office questions or the one before, the idea that there are large sums of money to be saved by doing away with the scheme is completely fallacious. Anyone who suggests that will have a black hole not only in their plans for security but in their financial plans.
With every month that passes, it becomes clearer that the ID card scheme will never be introduced, yet, as the Home Secretary has just said, at last month's Home Office questions she was determined to tell us about the new contracts that she had signed to create the system. There are billions of pounds of taxpayers' money at stake, so will she pledge today to publish the details of those contracts and the break clauses in them, to remove any suspicion that she is trying to tie the hands of her successors and land the British taxpayer with a huge and unnecessary bill for a discredited policy?
I made clear and announced to the House the costs of breaking those contracts. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is not proposing that I put commercially confidential information into the public domain—leak it, perhaps? We have been completely clear that, of the total cost of implementing ID cards, approximately 70 per cent. would need to be spent in any event, just to implement secure biometric passports. I presume that Opposition Members are not turning their backs on what every other Schengen country is going to do: put fingerprints into secure biometric passports. The operational costs of issuing ID cards in addition to that will be recovered largely from fees, so, as I said earlier, the Opposition's suggestion that there is a large amount of money to be saved by scrapping the ID card scheme suggests that there is a black hole not only in their plans but in their finances.