Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 4:25 pm on 19 March 2009.
I wanted to raise earlier an issue regarding the national identity register. The Select Committee report wanted confirmation that
"the National Identity Register will not be used as a matter of routine to monitor the activities of individuals."
The Government's response stated that
"it would be a significant undertaking to use it 'to monitor the activities of individuals' and certainly not something that would be practicable to use as a matter of course or in real-time."
I hoped that the Government would state definitively that they will not use the register to monitor the activities of individuals. The response had more caveats than that.